Path of Exile Questions Thread - October 20, 2020

Questions Thread - October 20, 2020
How We're Developing Our Next Expansion Differently
The "secret" truth behind Harvest going core.
Hi I'm Mathil, been playing PoE for 8 years & streaming it for 6 AMA
I think some of the people here are treating PoE as a job. If you do not find it fun anymore then it is a sign that you need to take a break from PoE.
I love PoE visual clarity
The Shaper, u/Whyunopraisethesun, Digital Collage, 2020
Hello, ex prices? Are the bots here yet?
Here's what 95% job speed does for Agility
Deception speed test with items (spoiler alert, it's useless)
Oversaturation.
Alva finally delivers!
3000 hours has built to this moment. My poe experience has peaked.
POE Official Trade Site Down, Ex @ 1c each, absolute pandemonium!
Look how they massacred my boy
Found these gloves in Delve. Never knew that Corrupted Blood mod exists on gloves!
I've been playing Hardcore since beta and this is my most confusing death
Teh Shaper, Me, Digital Collage, 2020
Replica Dreamfeather + Transcendence is kind of insane - Build Showcase
Can we get exalts to 40c this league
Agility is still messing up grand heists. One would think after 4 weeks...
I've made CSS you can easily use in browser to switch layout of the official bulk trade site (changes layout/design of Currency, Fragments, Scarabs, Fossils, Essences, Cards/Maps sections).
This bug has been in the game since the start of the league. GGG please...
When I get a 5c trade request while in the blueprint
MBX got a little lucky

Questions Thread - October 20, 2020

Posted: 19 Oct 2020 05:06 PM PDT

Questions Thread - October 20, 2020

This is a general question thread on October 20, 2020. You can find the previous question threads here.

Remember to check the Wiki first.

You can also ask questions in the #any-question channel in our official Discord.

The idea is for anyone to be able to ask anything related to PoE:

New player questions
Mechanics
Build Advice
League related questions
Trading
Endgame
Price checks
Etc.

No question is too big or too small!

We encourage experienced players to sort this thread by new. We'd like to thank those who answered questions in the last thread! You guys are the best.

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How We're Developing Our Next Expansion Differently

Posted: 20 Oct 2020 01:12 PM PDT

This year has been tough for our team and has thrown a lot of unexpected challenges at us. This has caused us to adjust how we're developing Path of Exile, which will affect what's happening with our December expansion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

submitted by /u/chris_wilson
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The "secret" truth behind Harvest going core.

Posted: 20 Oct 2020 04:55 AM PDT

submitted by /u/Apxa
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Hi I'm Mathil, been playing PoE for 8 years & streaming it for 6 AMA

Posted: 20 Oct 2020 01:19 PM PDT

Hey guys Mathil here once again.

Been wanting to do a reddit AMA for a while now and I'm not streaming for the day and have some hours to kill before a procedure so if there's any interest in one of these and some questions to answer I'll do my best to get to the ones I can while I'm free.

https://imgur.com/a/bJZzJ19 - There I am in front on my collection of cosplay crap.

I've been playing PoE for 8 years, since closed Beta. Started making videos for a few of the builds I made about 7 years ago and went into full time streaming 6 years ago and I've primarily been playing PoE that entire time.

submitted by /u/Mathils
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I think some of the people here are treating PoE as a job. If you do not find it fun anymore then it is a sign that you need to take a break from PoE.

Posted: 20 Oct 2020 09:28 AM PDT

PoE is a game after all, no need to force yourself into playing it if you find it not fun.

submitted by /u/__Correct_My_English
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I love PoE visual clarity

Posted: 20 Oct 2020 08:26 AM PDT

submitted by /u/vozfina
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The Shaper, u/Whyunopraisethesun, Digital Collage, 2020

Posted: 19 Oct 2020 07:26 PM PDT

submitted by /u/Dezusx
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Hello, ex prices? Are the bots here yet?

Posted: 20 Oct 2020 12:08 PM PDT

submitted by /u/Hacep_
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Here's what 95% job speed does for Agility

Posted: 20 Oct 2020 01:00 PM PDT

submitted by /u/Nightmare97
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Deception speed test with items (spoiler alert, it's useless)

Posted: 19 Oct 2020 07:52 PM PDT

submitted by /u/Nightmare97
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Oversaturation.

Posted: 20 Oct 2020 05:00 AM PDT

Pointless rant ahead.

Man, i'm so tired of poe. I'm not enjoying the game anymore. For me poe at it's peak was when they introduced Shaper and Atlas. You were just running maps. Sextants.were the most annoying thing. Can you imagine, people were thinking that sextants is too much of a chore. Leagues were small and were just an addition to mapping. You could just map all day and kill guardians and shaper from time to time, if you felt like it. The game was easy, builds were easy, items were easy, it was enjoyable. I knew what poe was back then.

Right now? I have no idea. We got delve, and temple, and syndicate, and conquers, and blight, and delirium, and heist, and you supposed to know everything, do everything, pick up billions of items, influence, double-influence, enchant, double-corrupt, fossil crafting, sell the temple rooms, sell the syndicate crafts, buy breachstones, make them pure, sell breachstones, scarabs, delirium orbs, watchstones, prophecy, master missions, fracture your maps, run simulacrums, go back to delve, go back to heist, go back to temple, go back to maps, kill conqurers, kill sirus, kill shaper, kill elder, kill uberelder, what the hell am i even doing, am i still having fun?

GGG refuses to get rid of anything they ever produced, league mechanics vomit loot and oneshots, endless loop of frustration and joy. Remember when we were laughing at GGG quote, that POE is relaxing and you can play while watching tv. Well, are you happy now? I'm sure as hell not. I'm under constant pressure, i can't deal with all this shit, let me out, i wanna go back to harbinger, to breach, stop adding the new stuff and powercreeping every single league, let me breath, let me enjoy the core gameplay loop. What is the core gameplay loop anymore? I have no idea.

But they can't stop, always pushing for more. Next league is bigger than previous, 10 new gems, 20 new gems, 900 new gems, 100 new uniques, 30 new cards, new crafts, new keystones, new mechanics, more, more, more, every! 3! months! Trade league is unplayable, but i don't wanna play ssf, i wanna trade! But i don't wanna be in the same economy as a people who stack 500% aura effect and faceroll the whole game, like how is this even a thing? For 3 leagues in a row? After statsticks? After doubledipping? Remember when they were nerfing energy shield numbers, because people could run around with 20k ES and this was supposedly imbalanced? Good times. I wish i could go back. But i can't. Online games don't have older versions. So now we stuck with this monstrosity of the game.

Pointless rant is over. I'm just really fucking tired, see you guys next league, when they'll introduce another huge side mechanic after making heist core.

submitted by /u/Name259
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Alva finally delivers!

Posted: 20 Oct 2020 01:11 AM PDT