POE - Ziz and Mathil interview with Chris wilson

Z = Zizaran
M = Mathil
C = Chris Wilson

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Pre-Stream stuff
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C - My Notes are 4,300 words!

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Q&A
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Z - Hi, Zizaran. Community podcast joined by Mathil. Going to grill Chris Wilson on POE stuff. These questions are from the community.
C - Thanks for spending the time to ask these questions.
Z - 3.15 things first. A lot of things people are worried about, in the last podcast you talked about exciting things in 3.16 and 3.17. A lot of people aren't loving the changes in 3.15 Are there any mid league changes coming?
C - As you know we've released a lot of patches for 3.15 including one yesterday. There's more coming, none of the really big ticket items will be there as they require testing. Any easy changes will get in a patch no need to hold off especially if it's for expedition but we don't want to rush stuff.
Z - About 3.15 specifically people are asking a lot about spellslinger as a lot doesn't work currently.
C - So this is a tricky one. Spoke to developers and they gave me an answer they said they don't know what's going on with it. 1/160 is playing spellslinger, this is within the bounds of low/medium popularity build. We're very aware of the feedback that people think it's not in a good place. We don't have any specific builds that we need to assess currently as our spellsligner builds work fine. If people could inform us of what builds don't work with spellslinger.
Z - Even last league spellslinger was get a large amount of QoL and sacrifice things like damage for it. A levelling build and not really used late game. This is a very big hit to a lot of builds that were weak last league.
C - Question what the line is for what makes a good build. What percentage of people should be playing a build? We're open to changes we just need more informaiton on what to change.
M - I don't think it's in too bad a spot just took some adjusting too. It's still a huge amount of QoL that you have to work a bit harder to get. Still playable and lots of build that still works with it. Before you could chuck any meta stuff into it and it'd be comfortable and maybe too easy. It's still viable and I don't think it needs many adjustments at the moment. People doing builds are on the side of it being fine.
Z - Last thing about 3.15. You've been doing a large amount of change with flasks, people aren't happy with where they are. We're pianoing just as much as before. Would you pubically reconsider your stance on the flask macro or doing a multi key bind in game whilst it's still being worked on?
C - Mentioned changes last week and they're still in for 3.16. Instilling orbs work well and we like that. The patch we released days ago allows you to chose which craft to get with instilling orbs so that's a lot better now. We want to see what people think of the new system before we do any rash changes. Allowing flask macros is a rash change and it can create bad habits in the community.
Z - Is there a reason why can't do that in game in keybinds?
C - One of the topics that's going to come up with this is that we agree that's a solution but we want to implement a better solution rather than something that's easy and flask. I personally pushed for the above change and the team raised good points on why there'd be better solutions for it. Personal view, not opposed to it but we should try and fix the problem. If people are feeling instilling orbs aren't as easy to get then the bench changes should help.
M - I like the new flask system at the moment. I do think it's opened up new ways to use flasks. There's no reason you can't have an option for people to press all those buttons at once. I don't see any harm in letting them piano them easier. Ultimately that you've given other choices that I think are viable, I enjoy pressing the buttons less if I've set the flasks up correctly.
C - A macro built into the settings you can bind a key to multiple actions is not entirely out of the question in the futre. Some things you may ask are a hard no, this is a no for good reasons hopefully.
Z - Part of the reason you don't want to make the change is you can't take it back later.
C - Certainly a part of that.
Z - Items and loot next. Mathil anything you want to ask specificaLLY ABOUT 3.15?
M - Nothing I can think of.
Z - On Baeclast you were talking about headhunter and mirror and how every monster can drop that and that's exciting. On chase items I spent a lot of time talking to people and get this better. When talking about chase items we don't mean headhunter and mirror, whilst they feel amazing when they drop I don't think anyone has opened a map thinking "oh, this could have a mirror". There has to be realistic drops that you can hunt down yourself knowing where they drop. There's very little actual target farming, it's very important to have both in the game. Why do we see so little in the game?
C - Let's start by defining chase items. Could mean valuable or targetable items, we're talking about the latter here.
Z - Both are important.
C - You mean something you can increase your odds over the baseline by doing a specific action?
Z - Yup
C - Going back to D1 and D2. They had very small biases to treasure classes that enabled you get uniques at a slightly higher rate. (D2 stuff here that I don't know about). It's not a sigificant improvement but it's a small bias. That's the history of how the biases in bosses in D2 worked, for some there was basically a quest chain for you to do. This is in comparison to WoW where each boss has specific boss, that's not how action RPGs usually work. We've introduced that a little bit but we've stuck with game gives you random drops. In crafting we're leaning on random crafting rather than deterministic. On a scale we're at a 2-3 whereas people want to be 8 or 9. We think the game is more fun this way. We think if stuff is targettable will be worse for players.
M - Not everything targetable, just a few things here or there. Example is like shaper hideout, might be 100 runs but there's a slight inkling of you might get it. Skyforths was targetable by high level maps somewhat, that type of item has gone away.
C - We're happy to try and reintroduce that kind of thing and seems harmless to us. If you want to get headhunter you can farm specific maps to get the div card for headhunter. If your goal is to get one as quickly as possible without trade you fcan do that somewhat with div cards. When we put a unique on a boss. We either have it obtainable from the boss and have it difficult to get to, or make it more common on a boss that has a specific spawn. We're trying to make a middle ground of making the items appropriately rare. At the end of the day we don't want chasable to be very common.
Z - Specifically things like brass dome, memory vault etc. away from elder/shaper guardians. For most people that was a bit of a surprise. It's good when general pool can drop more stuff like nemesis items. But now by taking them away from guardians you can't target farm them at all. Why does it have to be so one way or the other?
C - I get the point, we've been discussing internally. We've heard the feedback and are open to discussing and you may see some change on that.
Z - Same with div cards. Seems like a great idea for something like target farming where you can use that as a pity mechanic. Something I think is devaluing items right now is Shvaronne's wrappings used to be a chase unique. It used to be 100ex, then 20 and now it's 40 chaos without what it's doing being changed. It's fairly rare as a drop and you can farm it down as a div card. I think that's a good thing as it's a build enabling unique. There's quite a lot of things that shouldn't be like boss items from stacked decks or diviners.
C - With div cards the only thing we can't chose is the item it gives pretty much. They pick the hardest item in the game and we have a choice. Have they voted they want easy access to these items? We don't want them to be too common. We make it drop infrequently and have larger stack sizes to not make the items too common. There's some cheap stuff thast really enables builds. We can't have it as a div card that makes it so you can't easily get an item. This means some div cards aren't really completable. Stacked decks have been a crutch as far as rewards go, basically a unique splinter to some extent. We do want div cards to be a system that enable farming of specific stuff and we think stuff like shavs is good.
M - Stacked decks seem like a bit of an issue these days. So many div cards out there nowadays and you never see them naturally and they give a taste of maybe you'll see it some day. It's impossible that you'll finish it. Any chance of reducing the bloat of div cards? There's too many now and you have to buy a div card storage prettyu mucch.
C - Div cards are paid for by supporters. So it's difficult to remove them, the hate and lawsuits we'd get would be a lot and deserved. If there was a card that can't exist any more we'd go back to the supporter and ask them to make a new div card. We did stop selling div cards a while ago, so it's been a while since we sold any. Don't have any plans to return it in its current form. Still trying to work out the place for them going forward. We don't want to remove from the game entirely.
M - Do you think they're doing what you intended they're doing? I don't know where 99% of the div cards drop and I don't feel like I have a chance of finishing most of them ever?
C - I think the mid band ones do a good job. Spammy ones you need a lot where you get trivial items and ones like the headhunter ones aren't great. Humility farming is popular and that kind of thing is serving a pupose in game. If you're being cycnical about it these are like 1000 type of splinters.
Z - Specifically going back to boss uniques, there's a div card for starforge, it has a decent drop rate from beyond you could get a few cards from that. Something that is very strange is the sheer amount of people playing in SC trade you can get one very early in the league just from stacked decks and diviners. This is what devalues uniques from bosses (as well as starforge being not great). Have you considered restricing drops from stacked decks.
C - Stacked Decks and diviners biased towards slightly rarer outcomes. There's a rate you're going to get a unique from boss, from gambling in expedition the bias is towards rarer uniques. If chance of kaom's is 1/10000 it's now more common. There's 1000 times more headhunters coming from headhunter as we've made it more obtainable. Stacked decks might have same logic where good stuff is slightly more biased towards.
Z - That's very extreme though. There's a middle ground where some exciting div cards liek shavs or exalts where they don't have a targeted location. I'm talking about specific boss uniques.
C - Larger topic our team needs to look at. Chat says don't remove the fun.
Z - Speaking of good unique items. Several bosses don't have a looting pool. Sirus is pretty good whereas Atziri's disfavour is a lot worse, if I had a charcter that could make use of it by the time I could kill uber Atziri I'd probably have a better weapon? Maven a lot of loot is fairly unpopular.
C - When I was preparing for this type of question and looking at value of items and drop rate from various bosses. The average value of what you get is from sirus is better than maven. This is partly down due to meta. If a unique becomes popular it goes from trash to several exalts so it goes from a few chaos to a few exalt per kill. This might cause problems where if we turn it down then people will be mad at us. Disfavour is in a terirbel place right now and we need to do something with that right now. Supply and Demand element to this. Sirus is better to kill so more people go for that whifch means less people farming maven and in theory maven items should then go up in price. As far as item progression we're wanting this thing where you start on white, blue and rarer and then uniques and eventually find better rarers than your uniques so the pinnacle charcters have all these rares that use items from those end game bosses (maven orb etc.)
Z - Specifically for the Maven, did you think about having her drop elevated rares occasionally?
C - Don't know if that was discussed. Team is pretty happy with where she is, meta wise would like some her uniques to be a bit more useful. Her whole endgame days are numbered with 3.17.
M - I think dropping evelated would be too much. The uniques are pretty unusable and that's 3/5 total drops or something. They either need a revamp or for the meta to shift drastically for them to be worth anything.
Z - Whenever you guys put downsides on items you overestimed how good the upside would be.
C - Uniques meant to have downsides so not just better than rares.
Z - What about awakened gems? Are you happy with where they are now? Hexproof went from a chase down to 40 chaos and doesn't do as much for the build.
c - The team are keen to add some power back to awakened gems. Going to put power back to the level 5 versions. Want to add more awakened gems that do more than just damage, want some that are utility rather than just raw damage.
M - Why were they targeted to begin with as part of the sweeping nerfs?
C - One of the reasons is we made awakened gems in a hurry and there were judgement calls made that wouldn't have been made later. It was only during the big rebalance of 3.15 that we could make those changes. Like others in 3.15 people think they went a bit too far. Helped there's been community feedback on this.
M - The main feedback I had initially it turned into glorified Level 21s for some gems and didn't feel worth converting to. A bit more uniqueness to them.
Z - Something after being implemented that got quickly changed was alt quality gems. Felt like it got nerfed just due to aura bots. Because Aurabots exist it felt like they get nerfed very hard. Are you happy with state of alt gems?
C - Not discussed with team recently. Don't know if it was same philosophy as awakened gems or not.
M - Think they're still ok as long as aura bots exist and work. Found an aura gem that increases crit multi by 1% for most people that's pretty useless. Still enough interesting alternates that justify the system.
C - Aware of the aurabot situation and it's on the list for 3.16 New skills being developed that are more game friendly way of doing group play, must note these might not be added.
Z - Make sure you guys continue talking about it. Disagree with Mathil there's useful ones.
M - My chat says you're mad.
Z - They say do like 1% more damage and when they came out they felt more unique.
M - That 1% more damage is still useful for those aura bots isn't it still in a good spot?
Z - It's great to have a build like aurabots in the game where you invest a lot in a build. Talking to people on Sunday, with destroying aura gems people don't like aurabot.
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They talk about chat for a bit
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Z - Harvest has been very very contenous. A lot of people are talking a lot about it. I remember something really stood out to me that you said on baeclast. When people get perfect they generally quit. A lot of people weren't happy with what you said there. There's a point in what you said it's lsightly different. When people get to the point they don't have a reasonable upgrade they quit, that's different for each player. It's important for a player tghey have an immeditable upgrade in reach. That's why Harvest was really popular, with drops outside of the first week you don't really find an upgrade. Most of the community weren't crafting perfect items and quitting. I'm wondering have you guys, there's a couple of things about harvest where a lot of people aren't unhappy. One thing is people hate is seeing a blisterlord and you aren't getting their craft this feels really bad. Or you happy with this?
C - When you a patch of plants, you can see what crafts you're going to get. You can't see if you're getting blisterlords yet or if you're getting several. You should make an assessment and go for it. Sometimes there's more blisterlords than you get crafts. There's 23 plants in a craft and you don't want to have to do 23 crafts. There's a disconnect between monsters and crafts. on Progression of upgrading items. I understand if a player has no feasble upgrades they don't want to play. An important thing we have to do in PoE is there are incremental upgrades and diminishing retruns is important to ARPGs. This spacing is appropriate for end game as players implicitally understand it takes longer and logner to reach each thing. A lot of reasons you can jump massively ahead of the scale. If you want the experience of how it's meant to work in a really pure system try the hard mode thing I talked about last week this emphasises the item system. One of the things with harvest we don't want to let people get too far ahead of the item curve. We get the feedback from players that harvest is in a great place and we'll review it in 3.16. Not major changes, we're not restoring it. We're not discussing removing it, it's just really dangerous and we just want to be careful.
Z - That's a large problem for a lot of people. No reason to look at items on the ground. Never going to compete with an item that's crafted. Very few drop only modifiers. Players liked things like the veiled buff, but you're never going to identify a well crafted influenced item. Never competing with crafted items.
C - Yup, that's something we're going to get fixed long term. If we make it so ground drops insanely powerful stuff next expansion people will feel the crafting options feel horrible. Find items on the ground that are good upgrades or bases where crafting doesn't make the best items in the game but augments them. Learnings we're getting from hard mode will hope here.
Z - Going back to harvest. Obviously multipronger nerf on harvest. Can no longer use augments or anul augments on influenced. Are you guys happy with how that ended up happening at the same time? Are you happy with how rare augments are. I've never found one and I play an awful lot.
C - I'm happy with the rates, but I'm making sure my view is not the one that dictates everything. I get the fact that some things are quite rare, rather they be rare and possible than impossible.
Z - I think a lot of thing that feels bad for players right now. It's the only really deterministic way to craft items right now. You have an item that has almost 0% chance to use a normal exalted orb people just sit around with that item waiting for a harvest that doesn't appear it feels really bad.
C - We have a situation where a player has an item that's really rare and waiting for something that's not going to occur. We need to communicate better that they're very rare aspritational items. Like making your league starter build require a headhunter then getting annoyed that you don't get one quickly.
M - I think the problem is that's not not really common, it's insanely rare. You can't realistically hope to find one at the moment. People have forgotten they've existed and think they've been removed. It probably still needs a few number tweaks. My main gripe is it's a bit hard to count on harvest as a system, it's in a couple of locations and it's RNG to get it. It's by far the best way to do a craft so you want to run maps hoping to get it. It'd be nice if it's a bit more targetable.
C - It's in atlas trees so it's slightly targetable although that'll change a bit in 3.16 with reduced atlas and maybe again in 3.17. We don't want it to be freely available and having something to look forward to. I don't know all the numbers are and whilst I can say it's okay it being rare, but the team could change it and make it 4x more common and it'll still be rare. I'm just stating our desire to have it be rare.
Z - Is it possible to harvest tradable similar to beastiary and make it have a cost?
C - Let's discuss this one, it's a good one. Currently when you encounter a rare craft, you can store it in an annoying way and trade it in an annoying way. We haven't made it entirely restricted to one character. Why don't we make it easily tradable? Currently when people find value crafts a lot of people don't notice or store it and don't use it. If we were to make it instead that it's a currency items you can pull out of the window so very few of these will be wasted, then this thing will be 100% useful as you can trade it as exalts. Rougly 10:1 ratio if we were to do that. We feel it is much better occurr more commonly and let people use it for themselves then having to make it more easily tradbale.
Z - From what you just answered seemed like you were talking about the really rare ones tradable. Why not make it expensive to trade, use an orb or something that's a rare drop? Make it so any craft is tradable.
C - The change to tradability would come as a cost to rarity. I think from a QOL point of view and stopping scamming it's not a solution people would like. We're want to look at logs and not see that more of these crafts are being used than currently. So any QOL changes would need to make sure that the same number of crafts are ocurring.
Z - So you're mostly happy with people using 3rd party platforms for this?
C - We feel this is the best way from a tradability point of view. Not as simple as just making it tradable.
M - Making it tradable just makes it like a new currency items for each craft. Currently hard or annoying to deincentivise people from doing it. So if you made it easier would have to make it less common. So I'm with Chris on this.
Z - I'm not, I feel this pushes this towards less casual players.
C - Ways to achieve not relying on 3rd party. Like opening a craft menu where you can put crafts and trade in the same window. For guild changes. We've discussed having master craft between multiple people but too difficult to add in 3.16. Doing that type of trade securely would benefit the game, not doing it now as focusing elsewhere but would help improve safety.
Z - A lot of people in community are asking if you've talked about if adding harvest back to full power would be okay if it made items soulbound.
C - Once an item is soulbound it can't be traded. The value you've put into getting it is gone. Normally in path of exile you get items, equip them, use them and then trade them away. It's hard to find Soulbound stuff in real life, I'm not willing to spend on stuff that I can't resell and get money back. We don't want people to get 10/10 items so quickly, harvest is the problem and not the solution. We appreciate direction of inquiry and don't think it'd help in this case.
Z - I don't think I like the IRL analogy, I don't go around throwing fireballs around either.
C - I think it's useful for economy, humans have traded stuff for thousands of years and lessons have been learnt.
Z - We're done with Harvest you'll be happy to know!
M - WAIT WAIT! The current Oshabi spawn rate is horrible. I've played since the revamp I've done Ritual, Ultimatum and now this league and I've yet to encounter her.
C - They are reevaluating harvest and that includes harvest. I'm not opposed to that.
M - We got a yes out of Chris on a harvest related topic!
C - Wait, she doesn't let you craft right..?
Z - Smart loot gets asked about a lot. Talked about decluttering and moved stuff from filter. Rares are very not exciting at the moment. Have you thought about doing more drop only mods? Or simply higher tiers that are drop only.
C - I'm trying to avoid using smart loot, as don't want to imply dropping stuff specifically for the build. We want fewer items to drop and we want to make sure they're better compared to crafted items. In hard mode it's easy just gut the crafting system out and just drop items on the ground as terrible as they are. In the core game we don't want to take a step backwards. This means when we're dropping items on the ground we want to do systems like decluttering and dropping better rares. We're not ready to go into specific plans there and the hard mode experiemnt is very instructive there. It's a permanent beta as far as I'm concerned, lets use experiment a bit. We can learn how people interact with crafting and drops.
M - Is hard mode currently more like a learning tools for you guys? Or are you expecting a lot of people play it.
C - Not concerened with the number that play it. There's no harm to deploy it, just an alternate league flag. Not expecting average player to jump in. It's a mode where you can't do all content.
M - Are you worried it might cause more elitism amongst people?
C - I really like the idea of some guy linking some average rare boots on reddit and other hard mode players being jealous. Whereas normally it'd be complete trash. Elitism in the place it'd take a lot of effort is okay. We hope there won't be negative elitism with it like we saw with hardcore.
Z - I wasn't planning on bringin up hard mode a lot. This is something that's only going to be for the 0.1% of the 0.1% So people are worried you keep saying you're going to lean things from it and get feedback from those people.
C - Being able to get feedback from a stripped down version of something lets you get more specific feedback. What is the right amount of items you should be equiping you get from the ground? We're not looking from opinions from the HM users. We will be looking at data from users from HM. When we announced Xbox version a few years ago, meltdown from community that we were putting resources elsewhere.
Z - On Baeclast you talked about this a little bit somewhere after legion. Where leagues would drop stuff from everywhere and you agreed that this was a not a good solution. You started changing things initially like making metamorph drop more catalysts. Are we going to see more of this going forward?
C - Our intention is that each league is the best place to get rewards that league but not the only place to get them. You can get fossils elsewhere but if you want to farm them then the best place will be delve. We don't want it so a player that hates doing delve feel like they must do it to get fossil. Can get these items from other means but best way in the content. Things like essences we need to fix up, still a long way to go here.
Current time - 22:15 (To help with looking at VOD later)
Z - QOL features like autosort or inventory deposit, are you looking into this at all?
C - No we're not. This goes back to philosophical stuff like item weight. Autosort, it's hard to come up with an algorithm that does it well and we don't want it in the first place. We added affinities so you can ctrl click and removed half the clicks. This is in the direction of the game becoming a spreadsheet.
Z - A very large amount of clicks. I don't know if you saw Ziggy tracking the amount of clicks in PoE.
C - I'm aware, we've been talking about solutions. Solutions liek stacking of currency should help quite a bit.
Z - Any updates coming to affinity system to make it more customisable?
C - No, but that's because we don't know any improvements that need to be made. Not philosophical.
Z - Customisable one, or adding things like gems.
C - Currently only on specific tabs, including free one. We're careful not to add affinities for literally everything. If there's demand for gem tabs then that'll create affinity at the same time.
Z - I don't think people want more tabs. Is there ever going to be affinities for things that don't have tabs.
C - Goal here is to make it less clicking between tabs?
Z - I don't think why not adding value to quad tabs isn't a good thing.
C - I could see it wanted to get really customisable where you'd have identified rares go one place etc.
Z - Sure but we have prophecies and gem tabs that don't need tabs but affinity would be nice.
C - I don't see prohocies being in the game a long time. I could see a gem tab being added.
M - Have you considered giving some tabs for free? Like beating A10 and getting a free tab.
C - It's a tricky one, I see argument that it could act as gateway to sell more tabs. A lot of users wisely just buy a small amount of currency like a map tab and that's it. If we gave them 1/3 of that value for free then we might lose 1/3 of the money we get from certain users. This is one thing that is good in theory and could have a negative impact and we need to assess that,
Z - What about a compromised like half a currency tab and half permium tab that you could upgrade later?
C - I'm open to this. Maybe we can do a trial and make it clear this a temporary thing and see what data we get from that.
Z - Premium tabs and stuff - have you considered removing the non-premium tab entirely? As most people aren't going to post the forums fro trades?
C - Tricky because people have paid for premium tabs because they're better than regular ones. It's certainly feel bad material. We have to be careful related to anything people have spent money on. We'd rather have the tabs be incremental improvements. Affinities were a free thing rather than paid as people had already paid for the premium and specific tabs.
M - Was that a discussion that was had, making them buyable?
C- There's always a discussion on making tab more advanced and charging a bit more here and there? Like stash tab folders we discussed making them chargable but decided people have arleady spent money,.
Z - What about a comprorise where trading is such a core feature, letting normal tabs at least trade? Keep colouring scheme and naming scheme. Let everyone have a single trading tab.
C - I'm not entirely opposed but If we screw around with this someone might say they spent money on it and now being given away. Something we should experiment with. Don't want to make it easier for bots etc. to make more accounts. Right now payment thing is an issue, if a currency bots want to be efficient they have to spend money on it. We can see what cards they're using etc. Harder to track without money.
Z - The T4 Aisling nerf. Was that too hard? Wasn't a guaranteed way to finish items, as sometimes could get something useless for your build. Killing Catarina is already a pretty bad downside.
C - We felt it was too powerful, was basically an exalt that was always somewhat good. Generally people finish their items off with craftbench even though they're not super powerful in general.
M - Imagine a lot of people felt it was a slap in face for people who wanted deterministic crafting as was still a little bit of deterministic then it was taken away.
C - Once you show someone there is a lever they want to pull the lever. You could have something in the game for years and until you show something else they then see the better side. Harvest was a mistake in that regard. Might be cynical but that's the reality. If you say "How about this" and add something that is in the wrong direction and people love it then it's hard to remove.
Z - I don't think people loved crafting before Harvest came in but there wasn't really anything else. Your audience is good at identifying problem but not making suggestions on how to fix it. People wanted deterministic crafting. With harvest a lot of things people didn't like were fixed with it. Which might be why people love it.
C - Deterministic crafting has a role in the game. We're working on finding the right place for it.
M - Part of the solution making crafting in PoE more streamlined/less confusing? Most people have no idea what to do and there's not very good information from the user base.
C - I kind of imagine something like an advanced item view that's interactable where you can click a mod and see what's in that family and see what mods are available at higher levels. That'd be pretty cool, but unfortunately a lot of work. Could be something having in place for POE2. Crafting tab, good idea from chat! (Sarcasm)
Z -  Back to harvest - Fighting things like blisterlord, there's a lot of hard enemies. Maybe not having the player fight them entirely feels super bad.
C - So you don't like fighting a monster thar's hard and you don't get a craft from? I'll pass that on.
Z - Moving onto Atlas and endgame. Why can we not farm conquerors at lower tiers?
C - I had to go to some team members for this and they reflected it back to me about why would they want to do this? What's the goal here?
M - I would think it's when you make a new character and it's like level 75 or something and gone through a few tiers of maps, it can't realistically go against A8 conquerors. So you're having to slog through maps without getting additional fun in. Early on it's 3 maps per conqueror and at T14-T16 it's a lot more.
C - I'll pass that on.
Z - At the moment game is very top heavy. Everything worth doing is at the end of the game. Previously was things worth doing early on like MF gear on low tier maps and running them fast. Everything right now in the game is gated behind atlas passives, maven watchstones and high tier maps which makes earlier parts of the game feel unrewarding and chores. That's sort of a problem for a lot of people with the campaign too.
C - This promopted a philosophical discussion with the team. The endgame is setup in a way that's contrary to our philosophsy. In 3.16 we're shorting it and in 3.17 we're reworking it, we hear you. The pacing of it is a bit interesting and we always want the best items to come at the end. Big rant I could go into.
Z - Important thing is things in T1 and T5 maps that some players want to do. And a lot of people want to hear your rant.
C- Keys into... experience progression in original POE getting to level 90 is an achievement. If you're in the 90s you're showing you know what you're doing, each level takes expoentially longer and just rewards a single passive skill. Difference between 95 and 100 those 5 passives aren't as valuable as they were earlier on. The problem is we've been designed our endgame rewards, we're put a lot of power behind certain gate points like uber lab. Whilst we wanted that originally like Star Wars jedi unlock ground. Problem is you're gating a lot of people there. If you're locking a 2% power behind a big grind that's better than putting a 20% power behind it. Ideally we'd have larger stuff earlier and gradually reduce the power of the unlocks as you get further along. Currently there's giant spikes that are locked behind all the hoops, if we made it so these spikes were locked behind less then that'd be a big improvement. And chat agrees!
Z - Obviously another thing with making earlier game more exciting. People enjoy running the same map over and over. Originally you could shape a map and run it over and over again. Now for the favourite map system! Currently it unlocks kind of late, have you discussed changing when it unlocks. It incredibly rewards with the knowledge of not completing maps. I can't remember what league it was, I made a video where not completing maps where you get a certain map more often and people asking what if I've done those maps? It's like where you can't use regrets on things. I think if it was unlocked earlier it'd be in a good spot.
C - Okay, I'll pass the feedback on to the team. We still need to do design on 3.17 so not too late to consider that.
M - Was campaign going to come up later or not? I can jump into that. A lot of people still don't really like chain running the campaign as leveling new characters. You said it'd be fixed more in POE2 mainly due to it being a better campaign. Still going to be a large subset of people that don't want to rerun the content again. Currently a lot of stuff that you can't setup until later but you can run it much earlier (e.g. delve). Any discussion in not strictly having to do the campaign? Or doing side stuff and coming back at a higher level and skipping stuff?
C - It's close to philosophical no. There's stuff in the campaign that we can change or fix. Some of the reason POE2 campaign is better is the variety is areas is a lot more diverse. I can't emphaise enough how muich we've making POE2 campaign more replayable. Addiiton of alternate content does give a bit reprieve but doesn't fix the core problems. People are okay with doing campaign once a league with a single character each league then want to level other characters with endless delve or something, but we think that'll get boring more quickly than the campaign. There's discussions ongoing, we hear the feedback and are talking about it.
M - I pretty much agree with that, endless delve gets boring pretty quickly. What I'm saying is more you can choose to do a bit of delve at 40 and come back at 45 and are a little further in the campaign.
C - What do we do with quest items etc.?
M - That's a problem for you to solve. A lot of players quit because they go through 2-3 times and then want to level another build but really don't want to go through the campaign.
C - How do we feel about Diablo 2? Where the entire thing is campaign and you run static levels.
Z - It's very outddated, going to have people like you and me who love that game. It doesn't hold up to modern ARPG standards.
C - I have played D2R and looking forward to playing it. No good servers very close to NZ. Reminded me of the sync tests me and Johanthan had in 2014. I really hope they have servers closer than US east.
Z - The thing you're saying people will be bored of delve, that's true. People don't care how they get to 70, they'll get bored of it no matter what. There's no sense of progression going through any of those. I don't have this problem as I play HC. In SC you can run into campaign 100 times and kill it. It's just a chore for most people to get to the interesting fun part of the game.
C - Are gamers getting more bored more quickly now? We used to play this type of game and enjoyed these long grinds.
Z - I do think it is we're different.
M - I gave it a bit of a thought sometime. Our entire environment/world is different. Just watching a stream for a while feels like you socially interacted. You didn't care about the trade system in D2 beind tedious and shit because you were actually engaging with people there, you played them for social interaction. I don't think it's the same now as you can get percevied social ineraction from elsewhere. WoW Classic was a very social game you didn't mind it was slow because you talked to loads of people. WoW Classic now doesn't hold up because it doesn't have the same social experience.
C - Conclusion is it's the children who are wrong?
Z - We have more technology now. Now that people have seen better people want better. 20 years ago you had less options. Didn't expect Blizzard North to put out content every 6 months.
C - Very interesting discussion, we'll keep it in mind for the campaign. We had ideas for weird leagues. One where you found itemised character dolls.
M - That was part of the suggestion for the campaign thing, D2 had Normal/Nightmare/Hell you had to go through it 3 times. You threw that system out and went with A1-10. You don't have to progress just through the campaign could do side stuff.
C - Discussion we had internally as we were getting more players. The idea of playing through the campaign 3 times to get the endgame was crazy.
Z - A lot of people find appreciative is that they want adventure mode and oyu don't. There's items liek seven league steps, there used to be fossil gloves that gave like 70 flat damage. Items that were end game items that you could use on items and use them to make levelling campaign more interesting. Won't have access to first few days or weeks but could use later.
C - We like the idea of items you can put in your stash and use on new characters. Having it as though first time through is slower and others are relatively quicker is something we want. Things like the ability to make really broken boots with essence for example, those fixes are done when something is quite abusive. We have a lot of levelling uniques, it doesn't take that many chaos to get them and we like that experience.
Z - For me in my head can there really be throughout the levelling process?
C - I'd have to go check details of the exact cases. It's not a no fun allowed, you can have a bit.
Z - Will there ever be more standable endgames other than maps? Or will it always revolve around maps. Are we going to see for example delve going to be a standalone end game?
C - So we've alterante end games in the past, Delve, reddit(??) that kind of thing. Access to delve is through maps. We see it where people want to run perma delve, heist logbooks. Trade is currently a way to do that. It's currently a privlege of trade players. We want it to be a thing that you explicitially have to sacrifice value elswhere.
Z - I don't think SSF players should matter for the balance of the game.
C - I'm an SSF player I don't expect to do perma delve, trade helps with that. We'll look at it with more in the future. We really like things like delve and heist. There will be more of this, likely all to be centered around the map system.
Z - Don't think you'll ever experiment with an endgame not revolving around maps?
C - Maps is the thing with the content and randomness and layers. We talked about how Campaign gets boring, or endless delve. We expect things to revolve around maps.
Z - Synthesis is something that would have worked as a standalone endgame, same with heist. I'm surprised you've not experimented with something being a standalone endgame.
C - We'll see, we've got changes coming in 3.17 so we'll see.
Z - We balancing the game, how many hours do you expect or estimate how long it should take a player to access uber elder/maven. What's an average player in GGG's eyes.
C - Had a discussion with the team on this one. The thing is an average player of people who come to your website, the average player doesn't get through the download. If you look at people who install the game, most don't get to brutus. Average player who gets past brutus doesn't get to maps. Who is the average player we want to care about? The average player as far as reddit is concerned is someone who is deep in red maps. We care about low skill players, we make sure the mid game is accessible for the average player. We make sure end game is appropriate for above average players. We want to make the path of going through below average to just above average is achievable. This is a bit of an unanswer but we care about a lot of different players.
Z - Do you have rough numbers?
C - Not really, it depends on a lot of factors like what builds are meta.
Z - Do you want the average player to be able to complete things like Maven, Uber elder etc. Or just a small group of players.
C - Should 50% of people complete the absolute hardest content in the game? That's be undeseriable. For the people who tune into this podcast, these people should be able to see all the content in the game, if they're struggling then yes that's a problem. A few hundred thousand people out of millions who've played this league, I want them to be able to get the end game and have a good time.
Time: 23:04
Z - Last question about atlas/endgame. Any plans to make changes to multiplayer? Not being able to progress your own atlas in groups.
C - Watchstone progression doesn't go and in 3.17 we're aware of this. In the past of this when we've made a decision where it's hurt multiplayer it's been to stop abuse or shortcuts. Currently very little benefit to multiboxing path of exile, we don't want it where having 6 clients open on 3 computers is the best way to play the game. We will make sure MP is more considered.
Z - Next up we have a big one. You guys have fairly recently intially PoE was balanced for HC trade and then some point that changed and now it's balanced around SC trade.
C - I can't remember anyone at work who said that but sure, we've always balanced around the standard one.
M - Was more of a feeling rather than specifically said.
C - We are balancing around Softcore trade.
Z - Defences are systematically getting nerfed patch after patch which encourages players to go more glass cannon. You talked about players are just trying to one shot players from one screen over, but that's beccause if they don't those monsters will one shot those players back. Why are defences getting nerfed so hard repeatedly?
C - Best we can do is a statement where we're looking into defences in 3.16. Discussion spiralred and there was a lot there. It's on the list for 3.16 where it has to include work on defences, we've not started on this yet as we're busy arguing about it. Slight concern we had is we had scoped 3.16 out and we didn't have defences on the radar there and last week we piled a bunch into 3.16 this is causing 3.16 to get kind of big. The scope may change, for example if we can't find a solution for defences then we might push it out. Out of all the topics we discussed it sounds like defences is the most important one so I think it's worth exploring with priority.
Z - You've expressed an interest in slowing down the game. Encouraging people to go defences helps with that naturally. SC players don't seem to enjoy dying either.
C - We'll see what we can do. Sorry for not having a plan to say here but discussing it. We're not just going to surprise people on live stream day and say "Here are the changes you'll like them", that doesn't work. I want to mention that I just said we'll change scope for 3.16 qand that might be guild stuff, that's a different team working on that.
Z - Old flasks helped be a bandaid for the defence issue. You can make a kind of tanky build for bosses but for maps without dodge or block is difficult.
C - The team were concerened with the power level coming from flasks, that doesn't mean we can't have defences as an option. This was explained to me well by a friend of mine who said they have defences and there's not much more they can do but they're still getting one shot. We want it so you can sacrifice damage for defences.
M - Is there more support coming for Ward? It's hard to build around right now.
C - We had this discussion. Once things are part of the core game in the future then there'll probably branch out more and more so it depends if expedition will come back.
M - I did want to touch on the SC thing. I don't know if it ties into anything. It's difficult to balance what you're doing in SC compared to HC with defences. The challenge in SC isn't just going ahead and zerging through the game, it's saying no to some of the offences and going to defences. You could see it in quin69 and in SC he wants all the damage and says no to the defence and then dies a lot. It's basically it's going for bare minimum or defence and life just to squeak by.
C - That's a good way of looking at it.
Z - Basalt flask. We lost a large amount of % phys reduction, is that being talked about? It's mostly endurance charges right now.
C - It'll be discuss as part of the defences discussion.
Z - Monsters are incredibly scary right now. The nerfs to players felt a little bit out of place when monsters were getting stronger and didn't get touched. A discrepency between monsters and us.
C - So in the Act 1 scariness project we made Act 1 scary and the monsters hard. A lot of the Rip clips we say are Act 1 monsters with Rhoas. There were some cases where went too far. We have tightened up our policies here so we're more careful with monster balance in the future. We are making act 2-10 harder but it shouldn't be as bad.
M - You're doing Act 1 and know there's Rhoas going to be there so you can adjust. If you do that in maps as you don't know what's coming. It wouldn't be enjoyable not knowing what's there and worrying as everything can kill you.
C - Our target is that you can play poe and feel safe and secure and occasionaly get screwed over by a combination of mods and have to pay attention. We want a level of getting complacent and then dying from a mistake.
Z - I think people like when they can interact with it, like with legion or metamorph. People aren't happy turning a corner and getting one shot. Sirus Monsters are very scary and incredibly powerful, is that being looked ati?
C - We're aware of the feedback, it's good to here. We do like monsters being scary in the right places.
M - What about something that's barely a monster, like Drox flag. Infused by sirus, drops out the sky, 8000 damage, that's fair!
C - We'll have a look.
Z - Some bosses are extremely random with how players access the fight. Like ultimatum and Aul in delve. Are you leaning more towards things like Shaper and awakener, some RNG there but more deterministic?
C - If you've got a monster thatn spawns 70 maps, to make it more deterministic one thing you could do is drop an item... like a splinter.
Z - Doesn't have to be something you pick up and tradable.
C - We want to make them more achievable. In 3.16 we're planning on a delve rework and make things like cities are accessible. Suggestions on ultimatum is the longer your winning stream the more common the trial master is, that sounds good.
M - That's what I actually thought trial master was originally, I thought I was winning enough. But it was all assumption.
Z - Yeah, I was incredibly unlocky with trialmaster and Aul.
M - We went over this and established you don't play enough.
Z - Brutus, the waypoint seems very far away if you die now. He no longer summons monsters to give you flask charges or to get zombies back.
C - We don't have a problem with either of these things. Might be slight tweaks but we're happy with how it is.
Z - Whenever you're doing the Maven fight, there's a small chance that it releases all the bosses, it doesn't seem to be deterministic. Why is that?
C - Because the team thought it was awesome, they can also take it out.
Z - It'll be good to have as an optional thing that players can chose.
M - I thought that's what the marketing was where you fight all at once, I thought it was fun.
Z - I think there's room for both. Going back to defences. Do you want players to reactive or proactive. You talked about how you talked about life and utility flasks which is exciting. It feels a lot in poe that everything is reactive there's very little time to react.
C - Utility flasks in 3.16 will be purely proactive. Life and Mana will be reactive. Our previous versioin of the flask system we didn't think of this properly.
Z - Can you elaborate on what you've been thinking on fortify if it'll be simple to fortify? With builds that currently use it will it be replaced?
C - I got in trouble for talking about Fortify last time... we'll talk about it when we know what we're doing it.
Z - This is something I think there's been a lot of miscommunication about. Build diversity. Community says this is bad, you look at your tools and see that it doesn't look worse than previously. When looking at old stats like poe.ninja we can see it doesn't change much. If you don't have a lot of time you'll look at top players and copy them. What a lot of people is unhappy about is build viability is when they've invested in unlocking their atlas and things they don't have as many builds to chose from to switch from. Less meta builds are working than before. A lot of people play a certain meta but build viability is worse.
C - Lets talk about both topics seperately. I got a good email about build diversity yesterday (Chris reads this email out and was too fast, sorry). Few builds guides put out so a lot of people play these builds, so a lot of builds randomly go to the top. Players looking for new builds see top builds and are more likely to pick one of these builds and ignores ones with fewer players that might be just as viable. Risk aversion and selection paralysis too. This is something we've tried to touch on before but this guy explains it better. Even if stuff was perfecently balanced we'd still see the certain stacking effect. Your point was talking about viability.
Z - That was exactly what I said at the start just with bigger words!
C - With the viability thing, let me check my notes. I talked to the team about this. From what we can see this is getting better over time. Each fchange is meant to be moving stuff towards an average. From our point of view we see large amounts of viable builds. Players think there's fewer skills. We can't dictate what builds players chose. We need a discussion of what you guys want from this. What is the change you're asking us to make? Do you want us to randomly buff them? Or start giving hints to what the good ones are?
Z - Harvest and Ritual people felt more like they had more things they could approach as a second build. People like Mathil could make most builds work. A lot of players are finding there's a shit tonne less builds at that viable.
C - Maybe this is due to the meta shakeup. If we release new skills going to be evaluated against the best builds. So we changed a bunch of stuff and now players are saying they can't identify builds that are viable. I suspect this confusion is previous labeled as part of a deseriable thing. Maybe doing a meta shakeup was a bad thing.
Z - But we've had meta shakeups in the past that have been very diserable. There's a big difference here.
M - That hasn't happened previously but might be happening right now.
Z - We've had big meta shake ups during the years.
M - I think it's just a different playerbase these days. We've had shake ups in the past and back then some people cried and we've adjusted and found more powerful stuff. Currently no one seems to want to do that. They still work and there's still diamonds in the rough out there. I can't stop thinking about builds that I want to try. I think it's just people aren't doing enough on their end through experimentation and figuring things out.
Z - I disagree, build viability is lower this league. I think a large part of that is defences. You don't have a bandaid.
C - We'll see how we go with the defence changes.
M - How many things have you tried that have failed due to the new patch.
Z - Forbidden Rite, that build doesn't work without block or dodge.
M - It struggles to take damage, yes. Totem playstyle is a defensive one as it is. If you play it right it works and it's playable.
Z - These builds are at a disadvantage to ones with block and dodge.
(Mathil and Ziz argue a bit here without adding too much of value).
C - I can't say this on Stream, I agree with Mathil. But we have to investigate this and see. It'll get looked at.
Z - I'm trying very hard to represent a lot of people in the community who don't have a voice.
Z - Can you talk about balance in POE. Is the goal to balance skills or to shake things up? Are you okay with killing a skill rather than just balance it.
C - There's a perception that when we nerf a skill that it's dead. That's not what we're trying to do. When we adjust a skill we want it to be in a good place. We want every skill to be at 110%. Theoretically if we nerf a skill it should still be played. The perception with players is that once it's nerfed that it's not worth playing. We don't get this right all the time. When we look at the top builds that we look at it's a random assortment of skills we've nerfed ages ago. People should be more willing to give skills a try after we've nerfed them.
M - How often is the system to go out back and shoot a skill, how often does that happen?
C - I can't think we've wanted to do that. We might take it out back and come back with a different dog, but that's different.
Z - The reason they're nerfing gems is want bosses not to die before they fight back. so end game is the problem, why are you nerfing the ground rather than the ceiling (influence mods etc.)
C - My understanding is saying why nerf support gems rather than mods?
Z - A lot of people are saying you're trying to nerf the 0.1% but the 10% is being hit.
C - We do nerf the top end too like with explodey chest. Sometimes we nerf stuff that touches everyone too so we need to be clear on that. With 3.15 we spent half the announcement talking about the nerfs and manifesto. Maybe in the future we need to come on something like this and talk about the nerfs before hand.
M - What's the harm in making changes mid league? What's the harm in stating going in before a big league saying this stuff is overpowered and we might change it a couple of weeks in if it is? So it gives you more freedom to make changes on the fly.
C - We've received such negative feedback on the past on mid league changes. Players put a lot of currency into builds and if we nerf it then it's super demoralising. Trying to stay away from both mid league nerfs and buffs. This league we did do some mid league buffs like doubling life of reaper on first day. With regard to where two weeks in we make some changes, if we could say that it'd make development better but negative reaciton would be bad. Would discourage staff from doing proper testing before hand. First two weeks of launch is meant to be good and not be a beta. this goes into things like public test realm.
Z - That's something I want to ask about. Did you get negative feedback for absolution and reaper being buffed mid league?
C - I think if we're going to go into effort to buff things we should do that before the patch. I don't think we got bad backclash for the buffs, we got negativity due to the fact that buffs were needed. Doesn't mean we should have policy of buffing stuff mid league.
Z - PoE must be collecting a lot of data and what players do. Atlas reduction, was that based on data?
C - We're careful with data. I know people who run game companies and look at the data and read too much into it. We hide the data from our staff until they have a good question. We're very careful just to load the data and be searching for problems. We don't know if 100/160 maps are liked, that feels like the right number but we've not looked at data. We had a table of where people are up to quest state wise and how many users are left. Starts at 100% on beach and then people who got killed past Kitava was a fraction. We saw a big drop in Act 3 and ocurred right at the beginning with Clarrisa quest. 18% drop related to that period of that. A lot of questions as to why this was. The answer was it wasn't people who hadn't completed that quest, it was those that had. It's because Act 3 is a mess where you go all over the place and takes ages to complete any quests so losing 18% of players there. Nothing to do with Clarissa.
Z - For patches and stuff how important is data in patches and new leagues.
C - I have a meeting in 10 minutes, so we have 10 minutes left.
Z - I didn't know there was a time limit.
C - We can always do another one of these.
Z - Trying to get to most important ones now.
Z - Health bars for bosses from POE2 is it coming before?
C - Probably not but we'll see.
Z - Any larger changes for POE2 coming before hand?
C - Skill system is core POE2 and not coming sooner. We're piling in as many changes as we can make to POE1. Our goal is to release a lot of POE1 improvement.
Z - Will console get something like POE trade, AH is hard to use.
C - This is a tricky one here. Go to website and find item easily but pain to trade. Other is hard to find item but easy to complete trade. Problem with mixing two together is that someone will use website to find item and then the other system to trade, getting best of both worlds.
Z - Visual clutter very rough, any chacne of a filter/
C - We'd rather solve the problem then a filter.
Z - Damage dummy, sometimes have to experiment with things and it's difficult.
C - Out feelings is target dummies are the direction. We'd rather players have to experiment against monsters.
Z - What about right now, POB and POE in game doesn't give accurate representation of how things scale. Spectres can't calculate anything in game.
C - We want to provide better information in game. Ideally populate wiki with better information and make stuff accessible in game. Some of the skills are already too complicated.
Z - Talked in Exilecon about removing mechanics in POE2 to deal with content bloat.
C - Ultimatum and Expedition core at some point with improvement and likely to remove two leagues at that point. Talisman is staying!!!!!
Z - Quest Rewards during the campaign seeming a little off. Something like smart loot for quest rewards?
C - We don't want to hand out too powerful items from quest rewards. We are looking at reviewing quest rewards so they're interesting. Examples of vendor letting you alch something or setting an item to 20 quality. For emphasis this quest reward stuff isn't likely to be in 3.16.
Z - Gems etc. some classes don't have access to every gem, is there still a reason for that in current POE?
C - There's examples with templars not getting critical strike gems that we'll look at. In hard mode there's no gem vendors.
Z - POE Mobile?
C - No news yet, it's so polished. Quite keen to share stuff but still some time before it is ready. I should go now.
M - Would it be playable on PC?
C - Not really.
Z - Thank you for taking time out!