Stop treating Early Access like a "League"

This is version 0.1.1 Early Access, not a fully functional league. Noone expected a complete, consistent experience. We expected random tree resets, Massive paradigm-shifting content drops, new classes and abilities dropped as available, etc.

From the interviews and announcements, it's obvious that you're making release based decisions as if this was POE1, and you're making balance and release decisions around not breaking the economy or being unfair to players.

Don't. We expect it to drop as it's ready. New classes, new skill/support gems, etc. Everything that has a "Coming Soon" slot programmed in as a place holder should be fair game to drop this league, we're waiting for it to show-up.

i think they decided to do it this way after first and very obvious/needed balance changes cause a riot on reddit.

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CyberDweller#7026 a écrit :

This is version 0.1.1 Early Access, not a fully functional league. Noone expected a complete, consistent experience. We expected random tree resets, Massive paradigm-shifting content drops, new classes and abilities dropped as available, etc.

From the interviews and announcements, it's obvious that you're making release based decisions as if this was POE1, and you're making balance and release decisions around not breaking the economy or being unfair to players.

Don't. We expect it to drop as it's ready. New classes, new skill/support gems, etc. Everything that has a "Coming Soon" slot programmed in as a place holder should be fair game to drop this league, we're waiting for it to show-up.

+1

Couldn't agree more.

With the best interests of PoE2 1.0 in mind I also wish that GGG was more proactive about fixing what they think needs to be fixed.

Devil's Advocate: IF for some reason they are thinking about sweeping changes it's good that they take time & be thoughtful and not just change "A" but also remember that the changes in "A" also impact B, C, D, E so all of those need to be thoughtfully adjusted at once.


EDIT: Instead of naming this an E.A. I think they should have named it "Beta Test" or similar. Perhaps the term E.A. implies that there should be more consistency with a functional game???

They said that they don't want to do incremental change except when absolutly necessary and rather release bigger chunks in regular intervals. Their hope being that bigger content drops make players come back in those intervals instead of having them slowly fizzle out over the time of early access.

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Slart1bartfast#0332 a écrit :

They said that they don't want to do incremental change except when absolutly necessary and rather release bigger chunks in regular intervals. Their hope being that bigger content drops make players come back in those intervals instead of having them slowly fizzle out over the time of early access.

I'm aware of that but I was thinking that if E.A. is only supposed to last a year or so there would be plenty of content for 6 "big" releases which should put GGG on a 2 month schedule for "big" releases with of course some tweak releases to correct smaller issues that crop up.

Cast on X got nerfed and a bunch of folks(including myself) had just built frost sorcs. No gold to respec, etc. The problem is their decision is based on the wrong part of the consequences of that patch. Yes, people were upset. They were upset because they spent everything they had to make a build they hoped would feel fun and then it was removed.

Instead of not doing that again and essentially having an early access with no changes for large swaths of time, they should have fixed the problem correctly. Make build-changing fixes daily but let the player have the freedom in early access to switch builds easily.

Whomever keeps making these decisions needs to go focus on what they are good at and have a new person take the helm on the direction of how this is treated. Nearly every decision that we have had insight into has been the wrong one. Taking PoE1 resources, making an endgame that was worse and rushed instead of just going to EA 5 months before, these decisions on patch direction, etc. If the same person is in charge of these decisions for the remainder of EA we will end up with a worse product or 5 years of EA.

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KingAlamar#4071 a écrit :

With the best interests of PoE2 1.0 in mind I also wish that GGG was more proactive about fixing what they think needs to be fixed.

Devil's Advocate: IF for some reason they are thinking about sweeping changes it's good that they take time & be thoughtful and not just change "A" but also remember that the changes in "A" also impact B, C, D, E so all of those need to be thoughtfully adjusted at once.


EDIT: Instead of naming this an E.A. I think they should have named it "Beta Test" or similar. Perhaps the term E.A. implies that there should be more consistency with a functional game???

I don't think a name change would have helped. Call it "Beta," "Early Access", or "Testing and Improvement Phase." People don't care and/or don't understand.

You can explain to them what "Early Access" (in development) means, give them other examples like "Baldur's Gate 3 - Early Access" and they still refuse.

These people expected something that GGG had not even promised or implicated, and then they got mad and blamed GGG for it. They would always find a reason to do so.

The best you can do is "ignore them" or "debunk them" if you want to waste your time on deaf ears.

Adding new content needs to be done in a way that grabs attention. They're not waiting for an economy reset just because, they're doing it because combining new content and a fresh start is the sort of thing that grabs attention from both games media and social media, and drives player numbers and engagement. It's a business necessity, unfortunately, a lesson they've spent years learning, but it's not just a business necessity; newly added content needs to be properly tested, which means people have to know it's been added and come back to do the testing. From both the business and development angles, they really do have to add new content in lots, rather than piecemeal.

As for balance changes, they've also learned from experience that nerfing builds that people are currently playing, and which they may have invested in quite heavily, generates a lot of negative response from players. And since balance changes can't just be all buffs without being unbalancing, that also limits balance changes to the economy resets. Players are to blame for this one, unfortunately; if you want GGG to be making major balance changes whenever it seems necessary, then basically everyone has to agree not to lose their sh!t whenever their own build falls under the nerf-hammer.

So while I, too, would love to get hands on the Druid, or the Huntress, or more of the base items for the game... I do understand why they're not dribbling those things out gradually over time. They can't stop treating early access like a series of leagues, for the simple reason that the league release structure works, and no other structure accomplishes the same things nearly as well. Again, these are lessons that GGG has spent years learning.

And no, I don't think adding unlimited free respec is a solution here, because you can't take something like that away from players once they're used to it. They can only add something like that if they're committed to turning PoE2 into a more complicated D3 permanently, which I don't think it what most of their customers are looking for. GGG have given one-time full respecs to players in the past when major changes were made to the passive system, and I expect they will again, but they've never done it just for a change to a skill interaction that I can remember, or an item interaction, and they usually only overhaul the passive map as part of a major release.

So, while I also want to get my hands on as much new content as GGG will give, as quickly as they'll give it to me, I also understand why I'm just going to have to patient while they work their growing pains here. Let 'em cook, folks. They'll get there.

they could have avoided the riot if they provided a free respec token. Since that time they did lower respec costs so it shouldnt be as bad now.

Anyway, they need to make more changes more frequently but I can see the value of putting the changes in a new league so everyone starts fresh with the changes. Maybe a reset every 6 weeks?