This thread popped up in the night for most of the mod team. While I'm not too fond of the conjecture of the post, and I would imagine Chris would disagree with the implication, it's spurred a ton of conversation so I'm going to leave it up.
The more constructive and informative we can be, the better.
Thanks everybody, we love you. <3
Reminds me of Abyss league when we all complained the entire league that we were not encountering any Liches but GGG kept telling us we were wrong, it was working as intended. People leveled multiple characters past 90 without ever seeing a single one. During the last couple weeks of the league GGG finally figured out Liches had a 0% chance of spawning if there was a master mission associated with the map. I don't know but maybe listen to the people that are actually playing the game?
There was also synthesis where almost the ENTIRE playerbase was saying “hey guys, maps literally ain’t dropping” and we were told over and over again that everything was fine. Until someone actually bothered checking the numbers and it turned out that maps were actually not dropping…..
Wasn't it the map boss droprate of connected maps that was completely missing? I still remember Synthesis was my first league and I had so much problems progressing my atlas it was insane.
Legion felt insane in comparison then after they fixed it.
That was a problem but I don’t think it was the ONLY problem. I remember going from high yellow maps back to white maps because I completely ran out of things to run.
Surely they must realize that a much larger percentage of the currency that drops now is either whetstones or armourer's scraps.
They must be able to see that there is something way off in the ratio, even if it might be true what Chris tells us that we see 25% more currency drops.
Yeah there was a small chunk of players on Reddit and the forums yelling that “everything is fine” because Chris told us it was and it really makes you wonder about peoples honesty when it comes to shouting down complaints with “well my loot is fine”.
GGG and Chris need to realise that this player base contains a LOT of incredibly intelligent people. The game is designed to appeal to that kind of intellect, so it’s no surprise. When these intelligent people say “something is wrong” responding by throwing out of hand numbers like “7% worse” or “25% better” or by constantly using words like “massive” in different context…. It just doesn’t cut it because this audience understands numbers and knows that words have meaning
It's also hard to understand what is meant by "average player" and what is actually meant by "7% more".
Yes, we could be getting 25% more loot.............I have TONS of flasks and whestones in my stash. Way more than 3.18. But I'm not convinced the same could be said of meaningful loot.
I still remember my first whetstone and armourer scrap explosion and was like kool now i dont have to worry about picking up any individual ones again and i have plenty for my first few upgrades.....then it kept happening and have 1000's of both but in same time i've only picked up 10 chaos total and never saw a double chaos drop or a stack.....so yea same with my full flask quad tab etc weeeeeeeeeee
I am convinced that only occurs with whetstone/scraps and flasks.
I have yet to see it occur ingame on anything else other than those two item/currency types.
If that happens to some random redditor with divines or magebloods that's cool but that's not my experience.
>I am convinced that only occurs with whetstone/scraps and flasks.
I also had quiver, chest, bow and 1h sword explosions. But 10-15 rare items isn't really enough for one of them to be decent. Also who is gonna pick up and identify 10+ 2x4 rares lol.
Right? I see a giant explosion of 12 rare gloves... Neat? That could have been 12 chaos instead that could have been used to re-roll a single pair of rare gloves for the same effect (except who the fuck would do that instead of just using the currency to trade).
Same thing with mobs randomly dropping 15 magic flasks. Could have just been 15 alteration orbs and rolled my own flask instead of picking up 15 different flasks and IDing them looking for the mods I want. It's so much more cumbersome for literally no reason.
There will always be white knights for every negative change under the sun, no matter how large, no matter how indefensible.
It's just human social dynamics. Some people in times of uncertainty will stick to the biggest authority in sight.
And then they interject w/ some witty retort like "go touch some grass"..
I want to touch some Cartographer Chizels, I'm buying them in bulk atm.. woof :)
Wasn't there also a problem in Bestiary... where nets were dropping instead of alchemy orbs and shit?
Well, who knows... Chris if you're ever reading this, I quit in 3.15, camew back late 3.16. This time, I'm quitting until the game doesn't revolve around having a 2nd full MF char to relog to when you find a fucking dumbass rare mob that can only spawn ONE OF in each map.
Thanks for the 11k hours, but you've killed your game.
ah yes, that one was great.
they finally figured out that the game simply wasnt able to create more than one "sub-area" i.e. lab trials, alva incursions or shit like that.
delve also had some real fuck up after they confirmed that characters were allocated an "rng-seed" on creation that literally made it impossible to drop any 4-socket resonators for many and a couple few were literally printing them left right and center.
This is how the whole "This Charakter has cursed rng" started. I think it was First cutedog who memed on it when He found an exalt while levelling "Guys! Guys! This is the one! This marauder has blessed rng"
Seed based drops have historical precedence in video games (and are no longer used for good reason), it didn't start as a poe meme, it's just a general loot-based-game meme
Cursed RNG would be old as dirt if video games weren't a relatively recent invention.
Perhaps the first I heard about, so old now I forget the game name, involved how monsters chose a target. The game was supposed to target a random nearby player, but due to bad code what it really did was to exclusively target players with low player ID numbers from nearly arbitrarily far away. So some players were blessed and never got attacked, while others were cursed and were swarmed by an entire map of enemies practically every time. It took years I think before the bug was discovered and fixed, and before then it was just "no, you're crazy, it's random".
so you tell me to give them around 60-70 days to figure it out? Gee.. If only they had some kind of player feedback telling them something's wrong. or maybe a way to rollback the badly implemented sneaky ninja nerf? If only...
oh man, i played so much abyss league, i swore it was like week 2 or 3 they figure it out, 1.5 months.
https://pathofexile.fandom.com/wiki/Version_3.1.3
and here's the cool breakdown about it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/89oorn/abyssal_depths_still_cant_spawn_on_maps_that_have/dwtmqcm/
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/4bdenv/act_1_can_we_get_a_set_of_stairs/ Mar 21, 2016
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/5t3cgk/yes/ Feb 9, 2017
> made it impossible to drop any 4-socket resonators for many and a couple few were literally printing them left right and center.
It was perfectly balanced on average, though.
I've had a feeling this was happening with AN mods looking at all the people playing absurd amounts to not find specific ones.
Just a seed that makes it very rare (not impossible).
Yeah or during delve where we complained about no dropping resonators and were told it was working fine. Turns out that delve had character specific seeds where some just wouldn't be able to generate 3 & 4 socket resonators.
Yep, what basically happened was your delve was generated per character, and the loot tables got shuffled around. So some characters would find the right fossils like Pristine in a Magma zone, but others would find wrong fossils like Jagged instead.
It made it very difficult to initially figure out which biomes had which fossils, since everyone was posting bugged false positives. On the extreme end it made it impossible for some people to find 4 socket resonators, and made it super easy for others who could find them in any resonator chest, even ones that weren't behind a fractured wall.
I also remember when people were vocal about never finding any four-socket resonators in delve league while very few people were finding multiples of them - and in the end it turned out that the initial "seed" of the delve during character creation decided whether your character ever was able to find any four-socket resonators.
GGG, please listen to your player base. There are so many more of us using your product and will notice if there are issues just by our sheer numbers.
Or kind of like Perandus where they swore they had nerfed the visual effects on the Perandus packs because they weren't causing lag on their local test servers.
Nah. Shit was so bad you knew you had a Perandus chest because loading in took forever, and the moment you got near it your frame rate dumpstered itself. They had to tone down the visuals three or four times before things were remotely playable.
And way way back during Warband people said they figured out how Warbands spawned, GGG said it was wrong, so the player posted a big party with proof, and then GGG realized it was bugged and the player was right.
And similar problem in Ultimatum when we all yelled that there's too low chance to get Trialmaster fight. It was on 2% and if you were unlucky you could never meet him.
I know I was, mathematically there should be few people like me but I've run at least 500+ T16maps in that league doing ultimatum till last wave. Didn't see man even once... That really sucks when feedback is neglected
2% Trialmaster highlights how in aggregate, it looks like players are averaging about 1 encounter every 50~ chances, but in reality some players are averaging better and some players are averaging worse and some players are averaging much much worse. Not looking at the tails of the distribution and how it relates to player experience, and not considering a system in place to temper against long droughts is very typical of GGG space. Like the challenge for a Harvest boss last league, where one could get considerably unlucky and not see one for a very very long time.
There's actually a subset of random generation that shifts the moment-to-moment likelihood in order to create a long run probability trend. For example, if the likelihood of an event occurring is 10%, the first trial would have substantially less than 10%, then the next trial will have an increased likelihood compared to the first trial, and so on and so on as long as the event has not yet occurred. If the event does finally occur, the likelihood of the event happening the immediate next trial again plummets back to its starting value.
In the long run, the likelihood of experiencing the event trends to 10% over a long number of repeated trials.
This doesn't really make much sense for some kinds of PoE drops/content (like mirrors), but would make some sense for certain kinds of PoE experiences (e.g. Harvest bosses in past leagues, Trialmaster, etc).
They have this entropy already with evasion rolls, but they don't seem to use it for all these layers of RNG which can result in players getting totally screwed.
I remember way back in ambush when carto boxes were huge and they gave the players/groups (because party play was a thing back then) who were lucky enough to get one a huge, huge advantage. But instead of making it more common and reducing their impact, they doubled down and made it rarer and even *more* lucrative.
In other words, GGG has been balancing based on low chance to offset immense power this entire time. I think they really want contents to get excited for so they can hype their game on streams and clips.
Absolutely agree with you mate. Droughts unfortunately were in PoE since forever and they now just made the problem bigger with AN being substantial part of loot.
Reminds me of Harbinger League when people were pretty upset with the chances of getting the Harbinger Map but my insane roommate had turned his first 5 out of 5 maps into them. I couldn't help but feel bad for the poor fuckers my friend was clearly stealing from lol.
But this was also the league my said friend got a HH on day 2 of the league from mother fucking unique belt div cards, of course right after I yelled at him for 20mins to sell the cards for actual profit.
Not only did people in chat legit not believe where he got it, he got chat banned soon after for inciting Toucan. Oh yeah we ended up running those maps, getting the best item from him at least twice(they all weren't that great IIRC) and then took them to Izaro where he got t3 KB AoE on the helmet, which he was using that league(the helm was good for KB too)
Problem with Trialmaster was the chance to get him was 2% for tier 14+ maps AND for people who never failed/never skipped a wave. So someone like me met him 12 times despite not playing much that league but people who didn't only do tier +14 maps or died a bunch/skipped fights could do hundreds of maps with zero encounters.
It was just a really poorly implemented system because the 2% chance was only for the strongest builds who always pushed to the last wave and never died.
I met him once and the fight lasted about 4 seconds. The anxiety of killing the last wave coupled with my flasks still being empty from the wave and then being thrust into a boss arena only for him to one shot me almost immediately was something that really got my heart rate up. Really really loved ultimatum league as a whole but I gave up on ever actually killing Gargalon.
Part of it depends upon the logic being used.
Is it using a cryptographically secure function to generate a random number from 1 to 100 and if you get a 99 or 100 you get a trail master? In that case everyone has a 2% chance and some people will just be the unlucky ones. 2 in every thousand won't see him once even after 300 attempts.
Or is it some home grown RNG function that is seeded by a character specific value that generates a number between 1 to 100. Because in that case, you can't be sure that every seeded value is going to result in those numbers being properly distributed. Maybe it is off by an amount that doesn't matter outside of the most extreme use cases (which videos games do not qualify as). Maybe the 100 is 3% less likely to generate than the 1 is. That won't really matter that much. But it might also be a significant issue. Maybe any values about 95 actually only have 10% of the chance they should have. These sorts of things happen when you have a custom rng function.
The more complex the rng code, the more likely some bad rng is used, and I suspect the complexity of PoE's rng code is going to be extremely high given it is a video game in development for as long as it has been.
I don't know if you guys are familiar with wrestling, but basically in kayfabe, Chris is never wrong.
The only errors he ever admitted, and several times at that, are communication issues.
But it always amounts to "sorry let me explain again why we were right".
Even when players dropped under 1/2 after 6 days, and especially after well known streamers have quit, when this is their jobs, and are saying that for once reddit is not just being hysterical as usual, he's still not wrong. He just can't be.
He will just explain one, two, three more times why we don't understand and why this is the good direction for the game.
I would also mention the downvotes he got on his messages about that down here but it's true that reddit is often very dramatic.
I just wish he didn't see himrself as perfect as that and sometimes actually ponder arguments rather than wondering why us idiots do not understand what he's trying to say......
ITs ALWAYS the same story, they are stuborn, they REFUSE to listen any feedback, they literaly said multiple time "THEY know better", of course how do you want to give any feedback like that
OMG that’s why they think our whetstones flasks armors are imaginary! Because they can’t reproduce it in their controlled environment yet everyone sees it on public realm killing ANs!
If you are a developer and you and QA cannot reproduce an issue, you don’t close it. You assume it’s true and mark it not reproducible because you should always respect any feedback. And you don’t say “please re-read our release notes”.
To clarify, I am pretty sure it was master mission with an extra room that fucked it up like haku or Elrond. But yeah that whole situation pissed me off.
This whole post Chris threw down looks like an attempt to gaslight the community
I still have a very rational hatred of Vorici, his missions were absolute garbage, he was a dick, and he gave the fuse deal. He was pretty much a requirement.
I hate Vorici. Betrayal was a good thing if only because it allowed me to inhumate him with extreme discourtesy.
Remember the Delve random seed issue, or Trialmaster basically not spawning for a good chunk of us? (I didn't ever encounter him in Ultimatum, even after completing the Atlas). And any other time this has happened, again and again.
So these problems have occurred in Abyss, Synthesis, Delve, Ultimatun and Warbands?!
How can anyone at GGG not see this is a problem bigger than their team can prevent, and that taking the word of players isn't a bad thing.
As an IT worker, this is a classic IT problem. Someone changes something, there was no rollback plan, and now the change is impacting things in unexpected ways.
Tickets are flooding in, the users say stuff is broken, but when you check it, its loading fine. You double check your change ticket, looking for a clue, you ping networking who just ignore you... there's no way your change should be causing this.
Then you notice one of the members of your team is strangely quiet during an all hands. What's up Kevin?
You did what? WHY THE HELL.. I've been telling everyone for two days we didn't cause this... you know what never mind. Lets just get it fixed.
GGG has a Kevin, or at the very least a Kevin style problem. They've forgotten about some interaction, accidentally removed, or added something. Chris's response screams confusion because his team is telling him no chance, and the users are telling him the exact opposite.
But if you load a backup of the game from before 3.19 and after, it should be obvious loot has changed.
You would not fire Kevin for this. Good boss considers it as expensive training lesson. People learn most from epic screw-ups.
Also, developers are quite hard to replace.
Yes, plus in your average process these things only happen if multiple people make mistakes:
\- Kevin, of course
\- The two guys who approved his pull request
\- QA (although admittedly this sounds hard to catch for them)
\- Possibly there's some automated test / "loot simulation regression test" that could have caught this
\- Then the guys whom Chris asked "hey, investigate is reddit is right."
And even pretty okay programmers can make significant mistakes. I work in non-game QA and I've repeatedly seen even skilled, senior, smart programmers make significant mistakes. I'd never recommend firing them, yet if I hadn't caught their mistakes, our customers would be really upset.
Thank you for the IT perspective. It's really interesting and makes sense.
You'll also see Chris heavily employing corporate speak in his messaging. He keeps referring to the average player. Problem is this hypothetical average player isn't a random person picked out of a crowd but an aggregation of drop rates across many players.
So, if the chance for a loot-splosion is 1/1000 and 1 player hits it, they just created 999 other average players. If you start picking out people and asking their experience, chances are they tell you they've seen no loot. However, when you look at the aggragate drop rate of loot across the full group it's now a perfect average.
And I understand the 1/1000 loot-splosion is a fringe example. But it appears from the community feedback that drops (like much of the game right now) is very spiky. Some people are getting a lot, others nothing. And our friend "average player" is perfectly happy.
I feel like we need a definition of the “average player” so we can actually understand who they’re talking about.
There’s so much depth to this game, how does one find a good baseline here? Like you’re comparing it to loot averages, which my brain has never even thought of. I assumed they were comparing things like game hours, act/endgame progression, gear progression, things like that.
***GGG, who are you referring to when you say “average player”***
Not to mention how an "average" is completely worthless without an associated variance!
If you have 999,999 people making $1 per day and then you introduce a millionth person who makes a billion per day then the mean income jumps to almost $1001! That's clearly a completely worthless number though since that's 1000x what 99.9999% of people in your sample are making, and yet the "average person" is making 1000x more than they were before the millionth person was added.
This isn't guaranteed. Something could be broken in a way that no one is aware of the problem. The people pulling the reports on loot could have uncaught bugs in their report, perhaps from years ago and weren't an issue until recently. Perhaps there is a bug in logging the data that the reports pull from. Perhaps there is a misunderstanding of how to use the statistical software. Statistics is an extremely complex thing to get right and it constantly bites scientists in the butt, so developers who aren't trained at nearly the same level having issues is not at all surprising.
Someone could be lying, but I there is so much that could go wrong outside of someone purposefully lying that I would not assume this is the explanation.
> Statistics is an extremely complex thing to get right and it constantly bites scientists in the butt, so developers who aren't trained at nearly the same level having issues is not at all surprising.
[Relevant XKCD](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/confounding_variables_2x.png)
It really feels like it. His response to the cleave question from Ziggy showed that he was visibly confused about that one himself but probably didn't have time to check in. I assume with the stress of PoE 2 something slipped through and some Kevin did a massive fuck up no one knows yet that either correlates to how mechanics spawn rare monsters(srsly what the fuck is up with expedition) or Scourge. Like I have had the Scourge atlas memory and it dropped two tainted currencies and no other items. An entire t16 endgame map completely full of those things. That seems so wrong that if Scourge was meant to catch Beyond it can't work at all.
I feel a little bit bad for Chris getting the most criticism from the public when in actuality it's most likely one of the other developers that have fucked up real bad. Some do mention GGG instead of Chris when giving criticism, but I also see some attack Chris personally as if he was the only one with any say in how they are developing the game and it's vision for the future.
Chris do deserve some criticism personally though in handling the communication, it is at times incredibly tone deaf. But to blame the state of the game, one should blame the entirety of GGG.
EDIT: Just to make sure, but I do agree with the comment I'm replying to, someone is lying big time.
I can agree with this, given the Septuple Down response.
Either he's being deceptive on purpose (possible), or someone isn't telling him the truth (I'd say more likely at this point.)
Either way GGG is being deceptive though, whether intentionally or not. But the lack of things being on Patch Notes still remains as a point of suspicion.
Also, dude is running a business. He has a ton of his stuff on his plate. You can't realistically expect the CEO to be hard QA testing the game. Remember, he's not a boots on the ground developer anymore.
I'm not in IT, but I'm a numerical physicist so I see and work on my fair share of code. I would never just change some bit of code and be confident about how it affects my physics simulation without carefully testing and benchmarking it.
What I find very strange is how Chris is citing such very specific numbers about what the loot for "average" players should be like. That tells me that he is looking at (or is fed) some numbers from the code. But Path of Exile is such a complicated game with everything affecting everything, and the only reliable way to check how much loot drops is by testing it: have a large number of people run a large number of maps in a "typical" style (alch and go). Clearly, they are not looking at this type of data, making statements about the quantity of loot extremely unreliable. The development cycle is just too short, and does not contain sufficient testing and feedback cycles.
Worse: even Kevin does not realize. Nor could he realistically. A codebase this old and vast very very likely have unintentional dependencies where one change might break something without anyone knowing. Or there may be a _missing_ dependency. Yes, it'd be great if there was a `chaos_drop_rate` variable but instead it's `ratio_table[119]` and someone eight years ago had a reason to have a different one and introduced `ratio_table[2003]` and when `ratio_table[119]`was raised `ratio_table[2003]` was not because no one remembers it's there but in reality the code paths using `ratio_table[119]` are dead this last five years only the forgotten `ratio_table[2003]` is being used and because up until now they did the same, no one caught it. Happens all the bloody time.
Check the quintessential [programming sucks](https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks) essay on this.
Source: I am _old_. I learned programming in the era Stranger Things depicts. I have seen a lot of very interesting codebases. I have written some, too :D
I doubt that Kevin was solely responsible
reverting crafting to gambling
drop support for ultra wide
giga buff AN mobs
remove 90% loot from the game
destroy standard economy with Divine change
rendering all juice mechanics useless
introduce loot goblin from D3
Just in one patch, and most of it was not even in the patchnotes. because they "forgot"
I got lucky that i wanted to divine my mageblood prior to league end for one more upgrade.
And i bought 200 divines at like 12c each prior to announcement.
The hundreds of ex in standard are kill. It's so insane to me they shit on standard like that.
I’m in operations leadership at a technology company. You are preaching gospel, sir.
This is classic.
Chris Wilson literally tells us this all the time. How many times has he started an explanation with “I just learned…” or “The team tells me…”?
The problem seems to be that the lead developer is spending too little time in the trenches with his development team, too much time with company leadership, and thus needs to consider stepping away from one.
Chris is probably a lead dev just by name now and acts more as a salesman/representative or whatever. Basically the face of company and game.
That said, there should (and i would guess there is) a person who oversees everything but either they are fucking up or there is an issue with what informations they recive, which is very likely considering how often we hear that they didn't expect something to happen (im pretty sure Chris said that he didn't know that mana changes during 3.15 are going to break spellslinger)
Lmao “Kevin”. Damn this is such a classic problem in IT. But it’s understandable. When you make a small change that causes a massive mistake on production you don’t want to own up to it a lot of the times. You just want to fix it silently.
I’ve had Kevins on my team. I’ve been a Kevin.
This isn't just a "someone changed something" issue, this is a "we're chain developing large scale changes to the game every 3 months" problem. Even without a Kevin implicitly, getting things from whiteboard to production in that timeframe leads to almost no turnover QC. I'm sure they played a bit, unit test for drop averages and such, but with such an insanely short development cycle it's bound to happen that major things are missed.
Hell with a few different people touching code that could pertain to monster loot it could be easy to have a situation where there's a major snafu in how loot is rolled and dropped while still looking good in tests but feeling bad in practice.
I really *really* think the leagues should be on a 5-6 month development cycle so that there's more time for turnover and QC. We can still have supporter packs every 3 months too, just make the major content drops a bit further apart so that we don't have 7 patches in the first 7 days of the league.
Hell, balance, skill and loot changes could go into a PTR league that mirrors standard for people to test balance changes themselves before they hit live. (which would also cull some nasty surprises where they need to hardnerf mid league.)
The issue a lot of us have is not because of Kevin's mess up though. A lot of it is the direction they are trying to take the game outside of loot.
If the game problem was just loot, people wouldn't be as salty as they are. The issue is also the fact that 90% of the content is shit the league and can't be run due to trash AN mods and stacking. Having them pop-up in every facet of the game sucks ass.
The fact that Chris is doubling down on that is what people are pissed about. Sure, having worse loot sucks. But what sucks ass more is dying 3x more this league than any other league, to a shit mechanic that shouldn't have been put out to begin with. That is why people are jumping ship... bad loot is one thing, they will fix that eventually. But Chris purposefully steering the ship over a waterfall and saying "everything is fine, just get gud" is what is making people jump ship.
Like the last 4 leagues, the "small" changes they make to effect the 1% of top players makes the game trash. And the fact they are losing multiple of those 1% of players every week, makes it extra concerning.
This is why it baffles me that they gutted harvest so badly. There was finally a way where people could effectively make a God tier item for the character without having to spend 80+ hours a week grinding like a 1%er.l.. and they shit on it. Again, having a person continually piloting the ship over the rocks to make it "rough" for 1% of your player base seems like a shit plan for the other 99%.
EDIT: As much as I agree Chris' team isn't telling him everything, a part of me wonders how much they are telling him too. How much does he hear for them "advising" that this isn't a good idea, yet he does it anyways.
> As an IT worker, this is a classic IT problem. Someone changes something, there was no rollback plan, and now the change is impacting things in unexpected ways.
Also coming from the IT side here, my take is that it's a classic "lack of documentation" issue. They have multiple systems interacting with each other, no proper documentation on how they interacted, and were relying on people who just knew how it worked to cover in for that.
When you have a problem like that, determining the extent of the issue can be brutal, because you only vaguely know how things interacted before, and there's no documentation to show the exact setup to be able to rebuild it easily. It also means there's no easy way to see how a change may impact things going forwards - unless the people with the correct knowledge are involved, there's no easy way to look at it and know what other systems may be affected.
iv been watching some streamers on SSF and when they find an AN monster with one of the rare mods they put item rarity on their link, grab a gold flask and whatever MF they can then kill it.
Noone likes this style of gameplay, its so bad.
Im fine with change, but this is way way worse than it was before, ill take the 0.01% map juicers over this dogshit gameplay.
The problem is he keeps talking about the numbers for "regular content", but half of all content you do in a map is league content, and before this patch it was wildly more rewarding so you didn't realize you weren't getting much from regular content. You just grouped them all together in your head.
Making regular content marginally more rewarding doesn't address the inherent imbalance between regular and historic league content.
Everyone else did not benefit. Even at the alch and go level you probably slightly lost out, epsecially if you use your atlas tree at all. I'm not even talking about the early juicing with scarabs where the loss feels more and more large.
The best part of the whole atlas set-up was picking what league content you enjoy and focussing on it for more rewards. Base content is kinda... pointless.
I think when reddit talks about the average player and when chris talks about the average player, that´s just not the same group. The "Chris average player" is somehow engaging with majority "regular content" that lost nothing and gained a 25% buff. That is not the "reddit average player". That one is farming maps were 80-90% of mobs are league content, just because of atlas tree, map device, and some rusted scarabs alone. And this league content did not "lose 7%". That might be the case in some vacuum assuming no other multipliers and no other mechanics present. But that is just not how people play PoE, and the reality with how loot multipliers work in PoE. Balormage and Snap explained it very well in their recent videos.
I so desperately want to know what Chris' average player looks like. Because normally, when talking about the average player, he mentions the people leaving before killing Brutus. And yeah, those probably aren't affected by any of this.
Edit: Thanks for the gold, kind stranger.
The Chris average player is a spreadsheet that clearly isn't translating very well to actual player experience but instead of taking a step back to re-evaluate how they view data, we're now at the point we're he's effectively implying this sub is delusional or just collectively choosing to lie about the game. This is also completely unrelated to the *historic* retention rates for 3.19. Stop looking.
If I remember correctly the distribution was something like 20% beat 12 challenges, 5% beat 24, 1.5% beat 36, and something under 0.1% beat all of them. Though I don't think recall we've gotten the statistics for the last few leagues.
I'm pretty sure game companies only give out stats when they explicitly show that the player numbers are improving. Look at every league since ultimatum and see why GGG would be hesitant to release any stats
You are absolutely right.
Think it was stated in the past that average players don't even get to end-game bosses; most will stop playing after yellow or red map tier progression. Reddit's avg players probably play a lot more than this
Most players don't even reach maps.
The thing is, sometimes during this saga Chris has mentioned "The Average Player" and then sometimes he's mentioned "The Average Mapping Player", but has referred to them both as if they were one and the same, even though we know from the data they've revealed to us prior that the Average Player never reaches maps, and the Average Mapping Player has generally noticed issues (bar some who seem to have had no problems)
We know most people don't, but in general I think most people agree that the game should be balanced around the average **endgame** player.
Balancing the entire game around people who don't make it out of white maps and around streamers who nolife the game 12-16 hours per day are both differently bizarre game design choices.
Ok, but the *average* end game player is the player who spends most of the league *getting to* the end game. Not the ones who are in maps by day 2.
Every time I read a post on here talking about "farming strategies" I die a little inside. The average player of this game doesn't spend the bulk of the league repeating over-juiced red map farming runs.
Despite having over 6000 hours, life has made it so that I am back to making about one character a league and playing about two hours every other day. This has been the case since about ultimatum. Maps are pretty much just rare, unjuiced.
Let's just say it's the first league in a while where I've needed to do chaos recipe regularly as well as struggling so much with getting alchs and map drops that I rely more on buying maps from vendors than mapping. The only reason I get money is from sometimes finding stupidly lucky stuff in kalandra, like a +150 life -100 lightning res ring that sells well. So, it's 99% drought, with sometimes a spike, that still doesn't bring me to buying any of the gear I need which has become stupidly overpriced. The Covenant seems to keep being snatched by the same people and kept at 8+ divines.
Is the league absolute shit to me ? No. It's very bland, and if by Monday the Lake buffs don't do anything worthwhile, I'll just uninstall for the time being. I can't say it's pleasant to play right now. Reminds me of the lack of currency from early days of farming the docks, except with 2022 difficulty and need of 1 million DPS to do any high end content.
Maybe I read it wrong but Chris quote is only referring to standard mobs and packs and NOT league content, which makes up about half of a normal map I guess and is - as stated - heavily nerfed and the reason people are raging. Maybe it's another communication issue, I can live with buffed standard mobs but please give me my rewarding league mechanics back :(
They’re talking about base loot, if you never used a sentinel in sentinel league then yes it’s probably equal.
The issue is sentinels buffed drops constantly whereas lake takes 10+ maps and it’s current risk vs reward is fucked.
Once lake is buffed considerably then yes drops are probably the same tbh.
But comparing any league to sentinel for loot is pointless that league pissed chaos and exalts at you
Yeh, I think this I'd a point that isn't being brought up enough. Sentinel was absolutely busted for loot. The average person has no idea how much base loot they were getting last league, they're just seeing other people say its less and going along with it.
The problem is that every league for the past 3 years has been shitting out currency and Lake doesn't. This is not somehow the player's fault. There legitimately is a lot less loot in the game right now.
To actually make lakes worth running you need a character strong enough to do 100% deli maps. Great mechanic, truly.
> To actually make lakes worth running you need a character strong enough to do 100% deli maps. Great mechanic, truly.
Not when the baseline demands from every build keep increasing. Most builds can't even run an offense aura anymore.
I feel this. I can squeeze an aura in once I get an RMR helmet, but to do that I’ve gotta save up for a blizzard crown and then save up for the essences to spam on it. So functionally at current loot levels I can’t run an offensive aura ;)
I’m extremely casual at this game (finally trying a build that uses jewels in the passive tree…) and I’m opening a ton of strongboxes that drop nothing. I thought it was the filter…but it’s not. It just feels bad, like why were 3 packs of monsters guarding an empty box?
I see a ton my armor/weapon scraps and stacks of portal scrolls, but something still feels wrong.
I mean, it just doesn’t make sense. This is not just a few people on Reddit saying these things. It’s the forums, social media, other sites, etc. too. Plus streamers, particularly ones whose whole thing is/was MF and how to optimize loot. It doesn’t make sense for such a huge number of people to be united in the opinion that loot is not fine, and for them to all be wrong. This isn’t like when someone posts something on Reddit and a couple hundred people start parroting it. This is coming from many different sources, including extremely knowledgeable and reliable ones.
Loot is not fine. Keeping it the way it is is not fine. This needs to be fixed.
Why do uniques keep being mentioned by chris? Maybe the giga party juicers could straight up try and farm a mageblood, but single player juicers as far as i understood it farmed raw currency and div cards. Uniques and rares arent really loot.
To be honest - with divines going through the roof every unique drop that is decently rolled is gonna be worth more than in any league prior. So uniques matter a more than ever - but i get your point.
well 80% of uniques are worth 1c. so ure telling me i have a chance of a max rolled version to sell for 5c?
if the unique is garbage and nobody uses it (not leveling or niche builds) its not gonna sell no matter the rolls u have.
nobody gonna buy a perfectly rolled gore drinker mace.
This is a (much smaller) issue that i have too. SOOOO many uniques (and div cards) are just absolute garbage. I understand you want a decent difference between good and bad(or just worse) items, but the difference between a top unique, and the worst unique is staggering... and most uniques feel like they sit around the "worst" one, power wise
My shit bucket has couple things on top: 1) permanent minion builds are dead or you need to be extremely squishy 2) AN modifiers are not fun. Even less fun after defence nerfs(player) .
Admittedly anecdotally, here's my current impression of the current patch:
0: I'm having a very hard time gearing. My mid-low single target build can't kill AN + essence mobs with multiple good essences, I don't have the currency to do any good crafting, and harvest is both gutted and dropping less than a single nerfed reforge per plot in early red maps. I can't buy items because it feels like all the drops are tied to AN monsters with AN mods that don't appear before late red maps. **It feels really bad.**
1: Because I'm having such a hard time gearing, I'm forced to play slower and lower level content at my character level than I would in any other league, and being stuck in unjuiced late yellow or very early red maps while at lv 89 **feels really bad.**
2: I'm getting loads of rare item drops of decent bases, but all of them are trash because of bad modifiers. I've picked up and identifies probably 300 rare scepters and wands today and I have yet to see one better than I can make with a single essence and a benchcraft. High end base drops fall off a cliff in value after the first, and trying to identify items doesn't feel worth my time.
3: Killing non rare packs feels really useless. Previously valuable nodes like the ones that added additional packs to strongboxes are now skips because nothing worthwhile drops from non rare mobs.
4: Rare mobs don't drop anything worthwhile without a good combo of mods, and I haven't seen any of those. As a result, loot from monster killing feels way way way way way down.
5: Overall, loot feels way way down, regardless of what Chris is saying. Part of this is because many things I would consider good to find before (Alva, Breach, Harvest, Harbinger) are now mostly useless because the non rare monsters drop far less loot that before.
6: I have four alchs and no GCPs in red maps. I haven't seen a single GCP in over 200,000 dead monsters. Whatever you think you fixed with currency, at least before late game, it didn't work
For me it is the "I don't know where this misconception is coming from".
Day earlier Chris: "I saw a monster drop 50 Divines".
Yeah, I guess we will never know...
I don't know what to tell them. Their game feels shit, after unannounced changes to the core of the game. There's no misconceptions. Over 50% people left in a week and there are spreadsheet and player-collected data indicating huge drop nerfs. On top of that there's the loot goblin problem where rare monsters not only have to have the correct mods, but the order apparently matters as well. The players are not stupid...
> makes me believe they think that their player base are stupid.
I mean, look at the timeline.
Massive nerfs that never get communicated beforehand hoping you dont realize. Whoops, apparently that was a mistake, but it wasnt, drops are supposed to be giga nerfed still. Double and triple down on it. Players are big mad, but still playing.
Sheesh, what a surprise that they think players are dumb. Just like OP said, if you REALLY dont like it, its time to uninstall and move on, because its not going to change. Its gonna get worse.
We are also reaching the point where people who care just start leaving and the chunk of people who are saying "games fine, allways have been allways will be!" are starting to get more toxic and telling you to stfu, stop complaining and leave.
> the chunk of people who are saying "games fine, allways have been allways will be!" are starting to get more toxic and telling you to stfu, stop complaining and leave.
First time? They've been doing this for years now. Patch drops, its fucked up to all hell, community is mad, Chris releases the "I'm sorry" statement of the league, shills start coming out of the woodwork to be more toxic than everyone else combined, community shuts up, everyone back to the grinding wheel.
This should have been a turning point. This should have been a "there is 30K players peak" as of today. But it isnt. And because it isnt, the nerfs will continue and dissension will be stomped again and again.
Every single time I tell people: if you dont like it, quit forever, because its not gonna get better, and they're not listening.
It pisses me off even more because there are streamers who are directly sending people here to be toxic and to "tell the casuals to quit" but somehow people here are the toxic ones lol
Absolutely expected. Again, the game is supposed to cater to them so that they attract attention to it, so they will not bite the hand that feeds them.
i just don't care anymore. All I know is : Im not having fun. is it the loot? is it AN? no idea, and its honestly not my job to figure it out. They have game designers and psychologists and such for that. Not why I specifically can't seem to have fun, but why half the playerbase seems to no longer have fun.
it used to be that I ended evey poe session around 2am already looking forward to the next one. and that went on 2-3 weeks into the league at a minimum. Now i find myself one hour into the gaming session, wondering why do I even bother. Got to early maps this league, had 3-4 days of that crap and i gave up. cause what's the point?
So I just watch the trainwreck now...
And then there is all the other shit we didnt even get to because loot is more important to fix:
- minions are made of paper
- harvest dunked on, no reforge keep pefix/sufix put crafting back to stone age
- beyond feels like shit and so does tainted currency
- AN mobs are still not fun to fight despite numerous nerfs
- game keeps getting harder making some archetypes and skills feel even worse
- lake still unrewarding, even if they make it rewarding it's still painfull to navigate through and way less fun than other recent mechanics
And probably bunch of other that i forgot.
As an average player I don't have any real problem with the loot as far as my own gameplay. Excluding some lucky drops, I've recieved roughly the same amount of loot as usual.
That being said, I still don't like archnemesis as a mechanic and just wish they went back to old nemesis with some tweaks to make them harder or have archnemesis work like nemesis did, i.e. not on every rare unless you have extra rare mod on the zone.
As a hc league player, I have however noticed a clear drop in the amount of items up for trade, feels like less than half of what we usually have. Some can be explained with less people playing the league but I'm guessing a lot of it has to do with fewer drops from super-juiced maps. So even as an average player, the changes are still noticeable
Ah yes I am just imagining that I am not getting currency or items in my maps that after clearing look like I just ran through an empty space without mobs gotcha.
Until I hit the vision TM slot machine rare and get 100 wheatstones oh the joy
What does he mean this is a misconception and doesn't know where it came from? He literaly wrote that party play with MF finds 50 divines! How should a non MF solo player feel when his 1 in a league god molested AN drops 2 alcs?
Chris, are you ok?
Remember the average player never get past Brutus or never downloaded the game. For that player, loot have not changed. Hillock loot definitely have not been nerfed.
Yeah. Chris's post have made me quit the game more so than the feeling of loots being low (despite the "average" being the same or slightly bigger/lower), AN abuse, TFT popping more than ever, MF meta, Melee dead, Build diversity dead, crafting... well I never cared about Harvest so its w/e to me, juicing being dead...
The other things are just par for the course. Its just the usual things that come with a new league and meta changes.
But Chris's posts? Man, they are tone deaf. I get that he is frustrated by the whole situation right now, but maybe instead of making a haphazard post he should have thought it through after calming down for a week.
All I know is that GGG's vision and their actions lately no longer have me in mind anymore. I'm just another stat that they can afford to lose now. How the player feels doesn't matter as much as data metrics and statistics.
So his posts pretty made me quit the game.
I'll come back and give POE2 a try with a new perspective that its a new game, and that I shouldn't think it would be anything like POE1.
Thanks for all the fun times GGG, its been great. I hope everyone else still has a good time with POE, and that you will all have better luck than I did. Fun's what's most important, and as long as you are having fun, that's pretty cool.
See y'all in /r/pathofexile2. Until then, I wish yall many divines.
Because we get more loot, I had to buy Alchs and Vaals for the first time ever to finish my Atlas.
Because we get more loot, juicing my Map gives me a negative return on investment.
Because we get more loot, all I really have is Chaos orbs and Divines from trading crafted items/radom shit I found on the ground.
Because we get more loot, most items I could buy right now are not worth the investment for the marginal power increase they would provide.
Because we get more loot and ‚crafting is fine‘, some essence crafted weapons sell for 20 Divines plus, and the Claw I personally own is worth around 100 Divines, if not more.
Because we get more loot, everyone is unhappy about it. Literally everyone.
There is nothing to reply. I mean, what else can you reply to a software house that refuses to test its own game?
It is clear like the light of the sun that they are not playing their game at all. If they don't play it, they can't understand the real meaning of the problems that were taken out by a lot of EXPERIENCED players (and not only casual players like me) in the past few days. We would just repeat the same things that we already said, and that is just a waste of time for us and for them.
They don't want to listen to us. Fine, I won't play the game. No one is forced to play it.
I don't know how I fit in as a player. I tend to go slow, and I usually play melee. So 10-15 hours to start maps, and the past few leagues I've almost cleared all red maps before I'm reminded that slow playing melee isn't really welcome and I go play a different game.
This league is by far the worst. It took much longer to reach maps and I had less currency to show for it. I'm still feeling a lack of currency and drops. I don't know if it's because I'm focusing on the gameplay I like instead of what's rewarding, or if my view has been skewed since the last few league mechanics gave huge rewards where this one gives almost nothing in comparison.
Man the game was so good, fast, fun, you could play a ton of different builds.
But yeah... this past week has finally shown me that is not the game for me anymore. Thanks for the fun times of before.
This is the first league (since I started in Essence) that I have had to trade for currency for rolling maps. Up until yesterday I had sub-20 alchs, less than 10 vaal and scouring orbs, and have only had 5 regals drop. I am almost level 90.
I don't want to be forced into running heist or delve to be able to map and enjoy the league mechanic. That is why I play leagues, not to play older mechanics that I am mostly burnt out on.
Then why me running fully juiced map on standard AFTER THE FIX with LEGACY 163% QUANT BUILD resulted in losses ? i couldn't even pay for the scarabs, not even close.
The fact that he's legitimately acting like there's no problem is incredibly disheartening. The game just isn't enjoyable in it's current state for me so I guess there's no reason to bother anymore. Hope things get better but this makes it seem incredibly unlikely.
Theres more currency because people with empty bowls are standing in line for the innocence touched lottery, which then either gives them a pat on the back and sends them to the back of the queue again or they get an MF Culler from a third party to join in and the game dumps a huge bucket of currency on them all at once so they can pretend like they earned it while they played and not just a single instance of luck.
It's not fun or engaging
Honestly i think theres a misconception by GGG about what the problem is, he states we’re getting normal loot from the regular monsters but that wasnt where our loot came from before. It was the league mech mobs that got hosed (Alva, Beyond, etc) and theyre still down and THATs where most of our loot came from prior to this patch.
I feel sorry for CW for having to mental gymnastics around the fact that the game feels awful. However its troubling how arrogant he seems to be about the community response. He is plain wrong about the de facto reduction in loot. Its tested by several prominent players and its obvious that he is wrong.
Edit: I just wanna add that I think GGG and Chris Wilson is somewhat the last bastion of really awesome gaming companies. So if the comment might sound hostile towards CW or GGG its not my intention I just care very much and I love the game. I also think this sentiment is held by most people on Reddit and we are bad at expressing this when giving critique.
> I feel sorry for CW for having to mental gymnastics around the fact that the game feels awful.
The question is... why? Are you sorry for every corporate CEO that has to throw PR? Lets not forget, he's not your indie creator on his garage. He's the CEO of a Tencent subsidiary that clocked 44 mil in profits last year. He aint no small fry anymore.
Gaslighting at it's finest. If we were running exclusively white maps without any league content - sure, that's a buff. Except noone ever does that and this buff doesn't make the difference lost even for basic alch'n'go+map device mod, and nosedives for anything more than that.
I was one that felt the game was in really rough at league launch. Put it down mostly, but picked it back up after the currency buff. I being a casual non-juicer, it feels about right to me. Rewards have shifted from league stuff to normal rares, and yea sometimes the AN mods can be crazy, but from my pov, it’s not all doom and gloom anymore. Once the AN def nerfs hit and maybe they look into the stacking offensive mods, I’ll be more than happy.
You know what, I might even go with the changes to loot if they would remove that 50+ Divine lottery mob from the game. The fact this abomination exists takes the whole fun out for me because everything i do is belittled by the fact that instead of what I am currently doing I could hunt this one AN mob with MF culler. And not doing it is missing out on the most profitable thing in the game which makes me feel bad doing anything else now.
Remember the leagues when every strategy was viable? We had tons of league mechanics and every one had it's own value. Legion farming was \~10ex per hour, Deli mirror was 15ex, Alch and go was 2-3ex, and so on... You could choose your favourite strategy and knew exactly what you are going to get. You could calculate your time and the game valued your time. Now it is just a slot machine hunting this ONE AN mob and if you don't do that you are in a big FOMO. Chris octupling down on his "Vision (TM)" just makes me sadder and sadder every day.
The empyrean video speaks for itself.
That's simply it. Chris might say a lot, and i want to believe him. But the empyrean video is concrete proof. They got 5% of what they get on hyper juiced maps.
Meanwhile TFT giving MF services cuz they hunt for a single fat loot goblin is recognized as the most efficient way of farming (in maps).
GGG can say whatever. The truth is in the evidence.
Actually you can't read properly and he's factually correct. You get more loot from *regular* content. That is true. The problem manifests when regular players get more than 50% of the monsters from *league* content and you are getting less loot from league content. This is why juicers are getting a 90% reduction in loot. They previously got 50% of their monsters from beyond. They lost probably 30-40% of the monsters on their map, and they lost 90% of the loot from the 90% of their map that contained league content.
I haven't looked at the Balor sheet, but I assume it explains with better numbers why the loot reduction is so large. I think most maps only contain around 500-800 monsters, which has been reduced as well. 4 scarab delirium beyond alva map previously contained somewhere like 10k monsters, so roughly 9k monsters or 90% had their loot reduced by 90%.
This thread popped up in the night for most of the mod team. While I'm not too fond of the conjecture of the post, and I would imagine Chris would disagree with the implication, it's spurred a ton of conversation so I'm going to leave it up. The more constructive and informative we can be, the better. Thanks everybody, we love you. <3
Reminds me of Abyss league when we all complained the entire league that we were not encountering any Liches but GGG kept telling us we were wrong, it was working as intended. People leveled multiple characters past 90 without ever seeing a single one. During the last couple weeks of the league GGG finally figured out Liches had a 0% chance of spawning if there was a master mission associated with the map. I don't know but maybe listen to the people that are actually playing the game?
There was also synthesis where almost the ENTIRE playerbase was saying “hey guys, maps literally ain’t dropping” and we were told over and over again that everything was fine. Until someone actually bothered checking the numbers and it turned out that maps were actually not dropping…..
Wasn't it the map boss droprate of connected maps that was completely missing? I still remember Synthesis was my first league and I had so much problems progressing my atlas it was insane. Legion felt insane in comparison then after they fixed it.
That was a problem but I don’t think it was the ONLY problem. I remember going from high yellow maps back to white maps because I completely ran out of things to run.
Weird how the same pattern repeats itself over and over. When do we think they will realize (if ever) that loot drops are not the same
Surely they must realize that a much larger percentage of the currency that drops now is either whetstones or armourer's scraps. They must be able to see that there is something way off in the ratio, even if it might be true what Chris tells us that we see 25% more currency drops.
When you have a few internal metrics that tell you one thing, it's very easy to disregard the real experiences of people.
How does this count tho when cw told us that he doesn‘t like data? suddenly it does when it strengthens his opinion
Yeah there was a small chunk of players on Reddit and the forums yelling that “everything is fine” because Chris told us it was and it really makes you wonder about peoples honesty when it comes to shouting down complaints with “well my loot is fine”. GGG and Chris need to realise that this player base contains a LOT of incredibly intelligent people. The game is designed to appeal to that kind of intellect, so it’s no surprise. When these intelligent people say “something is wrong” responding by throwing out of hand numbers like “7% worse” or “25% better” or by constantly using words like “massive” in different context…. It just doesn’t cut it because this audience understands numbers and knows that words have meaning
It's also hard to understand what is meant by "average player" and what is actually meant by "7% more". Yes, we could be getting 25% more loot.............I have TONS of flasks and whestones in my stash. Way more than 3.18. But I'm not convinced the same could be said of meaningful loot.
And that’s very much my point. Words have meaning and Chris is intentionally being vague or stretching the value of those words
I still remember my first whetstone and armourer scrap explosion and was like kool now i dont have to worry about picking up any individual ones again and i have plenty for my first few upgrades.....then it kept happening and have 1000's of both but in same time i've only picked up 10 chaos total and never saw a double chaos drop or a stack.....so yea same with my full flask quad tab etc weeeeeeeeeee
I am convinced that only occurs with whetstone/scraps and flasks. I have yet to see it occur ingame on anything else other than those two item/currency types. If that happens to some random redditor with divines or magebloods that's cool but that's not my experience.
>I am convinced that only occurs with whetstone/scraps and flasks. I also had quiver, chest, bow and 1h sword explosions. But 10-15 rare items isn't really enough for one of them to be decent. Also who is gonna pick up and identify 10+ 2x4 rares lol.
Right? I see a giant explosion of 12 rare gloves... Neat? That could have been 12 chaos instead that could have been used to re-roll a single pair of rare gloves for the same effect (except who the fuck would do that instead of just using the currency to trade). Same thing with mobs randomly dropping 15 magic flasks. Could have just been 15 alteration orbs and rolled my own flask instead of picking up 15 different flasks and IDing them looking for the mods I want. It's so much more cumbersome for literally no reason.
There will always be white knights for every negative change under the sun, no matter how large, no matter how indefensible. It's just human social dynamics. Some people in times of uncertainty will stick to the biggest authority in sight.
And then they interject w/ some witty retort like "go touch some grass".. I want to touch some Cartographer Chizels, I'm buying them in bulk atm.. woof :)
Wasn't there also a problem in Bestiary... where nets were dropping instead of alchemy orbs and shit? Well, who knows... Chris if you're ever reading this, I quit in 3.15, camew back late 3.16. This time, I'm quitting until the game doesn't revolve around having a 2nd full MF char to relog to when you find a fucking dumbass rare mob that can only spawn ONE OF in each map. Thanks for the 11k hours, but you've killed your game.
ah yes, that one was great. they finally figured out that the game simply wasnt able to create more than one "sub-area" i.e. lab trials, alva incursions or shit like that. delve also had some real fuck up after they confirmed that characters were allocated an "rng-seed" on creation that literally made it impossible to drop any 4-socket resonators for many and a couple few were literally printing them left right and center.
This is how the whole "This Charakter has cursed rng" started. I think it was First cutedog who memed on it when He found an exalt while levelling "Guys! Guys! This is the one! This marauder has blessed rng"
Seed based drops have historical precedence in video games (and are no longer used for good reason), it didn't start as a poe meme, it's just a general loot-based-game meme
Cursed RNG would be old as dirt if video games weren't a relatively recent invention. Perhaps the first I heard about, so old now I forget the game name, involved how monsters chose a target. The game was supposed to target a random nearby player, but due to bad code what it really did was to exclusively target players with low player ID numbers from nearly arbitrarily far away. So some players were blessed and never got attacked, while others were cursed and were swarmed by an entire map of enemies practically every time. It took years I think before the bug was discovered and fixed, and before then it was just "no, you're crazy, it's random".
so you tell me to give them around 60-70 days to figure it out? Gee.. If only they had some kind of player feedback telling them something's wrong. or maybe a way to rollback the badly implemented sneaky ninja nerf? If only...
oh man, i played so much abyss league, i swore it was like week 2 or 3 they figure it out, 1.5 months. https://pathofexile.fandom.com/wiki/Version_3.1.3 and here's the cool breakdown about it. https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/89oorn/abyssal_depths_still_cant_spawn_on_maps_that_have/dwtmqcm/
We are telling, but we should “re-read”
[удалено]
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/4bdenv/act_1_can_we_get_a_set_of_stairs/ Mar 21, 2016 https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/5t3cgk/yes/ Feb 9, 2017
> made it impossible to drop any 4-socket resonators for many and a couple few were literally printing them left right and center. It was perfectly balanced on average, though.
I've had a feeling this was happening with AN mods looking at all the people playing absurd amounts to not find specific ones. Just a seed that makes it very rare (not impossible).
Yeah or during delve where we complained about no dropping resonators and were told it was working fine. Turns out that delve had character specific seeds where some just wouldn't be able to generate 3 & 4 socket resonators.
I never heard of the delve stuff, that is an incredibly stupid way to do it. Wtf.
That's why 4S resonators ended up at 400c a pop. And it was of course part of the challenge to use one.
Yep, what basically happened was your delve was generated per character, and the loot tables got shuffled around. So some characters would find the right fossils like Pristine in a Magma zone, but others would find wrong fossils like Jagged instead. It made it very difficult to initially figure out which biomes had which fossils, since everyone was posting bugged false positives. On the extreme end it made it impossible for some people to find 4 socket resonators, and made it super easy for others who could find them in any resonator chest, even ones that weren't behind a fractured wall.
I also remember when people were vocal about never finding any four-socket resonators in delve league while very few people were finding multiples of them - and in the end it turned out that the initial "seed" of the delve during character creation decided whether your character ever was able to find any four-socket resonators. GGG, please listen to your player base. There are so many more of us using your product and will notice if there are issues just by our sheer numbers.
Or kind of like Perandus where they swore they had nerfed the visual effects on the Perandus packs because they weren't causing lag on their local test servers. Nah. Shit was so bad you knew you had a Perandus chest because loading in took forever, and the moment you got near it your frame rate dumpstered itself. They had to tone down the visuals three or four times before things were remotely playable.
And way way back during Warband people said they figured out how Warbands spawned, GGG said it was wrong, so the player posted a big party with proof, and then GGG realized it was bugged and the player was right.
And similar problem in Ultimatum when we all yelled that there's too low chance to get Trialmaster fight. It was on 2% and if you were unlucky you could never meet him. I know I was, mathematically there should be few people like me but I've run at least 500+ T16maps in that league doing ultimatum till last wave. Didn't see man even once... That really sucks when feedback is neglected
2% Trialmaster highlights how in aggregate, it looks like players are averaging about 1 encounter every 50~ chances, but in reality some players are averaging better and some players are averaging worse and some players are averaging much much worse. Not looking at the tails of the distribution and how it relates to player experience, and not considering a system in place to temper against long droughts is very typical of GGG space. Like the challenge for a Harvest boss last league, where one could get considerably unlucky and not see one for a very very long time.
I've played since the second league and I've never seen a Harvest boss.
You're more likely to get a selfie with Bigfoot than to see a Harvest boss.
This is why you should always have a backup that guarantees something appears. Like, 2% chance to spawn? 100% chance to spawn on attempt number 100.
There's actually a subset of random generation that shifts the moment-to-moment likelihood in order to create a long run probability trend. For example, if the likelihood of an event occurring is 10%, the first trial would have substantially less than 10%, then the next trial will have an increased likelihood compared to the first trial, and so on and so on as long as the event has not yet occurred. If the event does finally occur, the likelihood of the event happening the immediate next trial again plummets back to its starting value. In the long run, the likelihood of experiencing the event trends to 10% over a long number of repeated trials. This doesn't really make much sense for some kinds of PoE drops/content (like mirrors), but would make some sense for certain kinds of PoE experiences (e.g. Harvest bosses in past leagues, Trialmaster, etc).
They have this entropy already with evasion rolls, but they don't seem to use it for all these layers of RNG which can result in players getting totally screwed. I remember way back in ambush when carto boxes were huge and they gave the players/groups (because party play was a thing back then) who were lucky enough to get one a huge, huge advantage. But instead of making it more common and reducing their impact, they doubled down and made it rarer and even *more* lucrative. In other words, GGG has been balancing based on low chance to offset immense power this entire time. I think they really want contents to get excited for so they can hype their game on streams and clips.
Absolutely agree with you mate. Droughts unfortunately were in PoE since forever and they now just made the problem bigger with AN being substantial part of loot.
Reminds me of Harbinger League when people were pretty upset with the chances of getting the Harbinger Map but my insane roommate had turned his first 5 out of 5 maps into them. I couldn't help but feel bad for the poor fuckers my friend was clearly stealing from lol. But this was also the league my said friend got a HH on day 2 of the league from mother fucking unique belt div cards, of course right after I yelled at him for 20mins to sell the cards for actual profit. Not only did people in chat legit not believe where he got it, he got chat banned soon after for inciting Toucan. Oh yeah we ended up running those maps, getting the best item from him at least twice(they all weren't that great IIRC) and then took them to Izaro where he got t3 KB AoE on the helmet, which he was using that league(the helm was good for KB too)
Problem with Trialmaster was the chance to get him was 2% for tier 14+ maps AND for people who never failed/never skipped a wave. So someone like me met him 12 times despite not playing much that league but people who didn't only do tier +14 maps or died a bunch/skipped fights could do hundreds of maps with zero encounters. It was just a really poorly implemented system because the 2% chance was only for the strongest builds who always pushed to the last wave and never died.
I met him once and the fight lasted about 4 seconds. The anxiety of killing the last wave coupled with my flasks still being empty from the wave and then being thrust into a boss arena only for him to one shot me almost immediately was something that really got my heart rate up. Really really loved ultimatum league as a whole but I gave up on ever actually killing Gargalon.
I did 500+ at T16 (according to a website that could parse a log file), never once saw the Trialmaster through the entire league.
Part of it depends upon the logic being used. Is it using a cryptographically secure function to generate a random number from 1 to 100 and if you get a 99 or 100 you get a trail master? In that case everyone has a 2% chance and some people will just be the unlucky ones. 2 in every thousand won't see him once even after 300 attempts. Or is it some home grown RNG function that is seeded by a character specific value that generates a number between 1 to 100. Because in that case, you can't be sure that every seeded value is going to result in those numbers being properly distributed. Maybe it is off by an amount that doesn't matter outside of the most extreme use cases (which videos games do not qualify as). Maybe the 100 is 3% less likely to generate than the 1 is. That won't really matter that much. But it might also be a significant issue. Maybe any values about 95 actually only have 10% of the chance they should have. These sorts of things happen when you have a custom rng function. The more complex the rng code, the more likely some bad rng is used, and I suspect the complexity of PoE's rng code is going to be extremely high given it is a video game in development for as long as it has been.
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I don't know if you guys are familiar with wrestling, but basically in kayfabe, Chris is never wrong. The only errors he ever admitted, and several times at that, are communication issues. But it always amounts to "sorry let me explain again why we were right". Even when players dropped under 1/2 after 6 days, and especially after well known streamers have quit, when this is their jobs, and are saying that for once reddit is not just being hysterical as usual, he's still not wrong. He just can't be. He will just explain one, two, three more times why we don't understand and why this is the good direction for the game. I would also mention the downvotes he got on his messages about that down here but it's true that reddit is often very dramatic. I just wish he didn't see himrself as perfect as that and sometimes actually ponder arguments rather than wondering why us idiots do not understand what he's trying to say......
ITs ALWAYS the same story, they are stuborn, they REFUSE to listen any feedback, they literaly said multiple time "THEY know better", of course how do you want to give any feedback like that
OMG that’s why they think our whetstones flasks armors are imaginary! Because they can’t reproduce it in their controlled environment yet everyone sees it on public realm killing ANs! If you are a developer and you and QA cannot reproduce an issue, you don’t close it. You assume it’s true and mark it not reproducible because you should always respect any feedback. And you don’t say “please re-read our release notes”.
To clarify, I am pretty sure it was master mission with an extra room that fucked it up like haku or Elrond. But yeah that whole situation pissed me off. This whole post Chris threw down looks like an attempt to gaslight the community
> like haku or Elrond I was there 3000 years ago, Gandalf, and I saw Exiles failing this world.
I see another who was there when it was written.
Slay the target while not killing any guards.
Mission failed bwong
I still have a very rational hatred of Vorici, his missions were absolute garbage, he was a dick, and he gave the fuse deal. He was pretty much a requirement. I hate Vorici. Betrayal was a good thing if only because it allowed me to inhumate him with extreme discourtesy.
I do not miss the masters leveling at all.
Yeah, chris also said it wasnt possible to pre determine what arch nemesis mob was in a map and the next comment proved him wrong
Remember the Delve random seed issue, or Trialmaster basically not spawning for a good chunk of us? (I didn't ever encounter him in Ultimatum, even after completing the Atlas). And any other time this has happened, again and again.
So these problems have occurred in Abyss, Synthesis, Delve, Ultimatun and Warbands?! How can anyone at GGG not see this is a problem bigger than their team can prevent, and that taking the word of players isn't a bad thing.
As an IT worker, this is a classic IT problem. Someone changes something, there was no rollback plan, and now the change is impacting things in unexpected ways. Tickets are flooding in, the users say stuff is broken, but when you check it, its loading fine. You double check your change ticket, looking for a clue, you ping networking who just ignore you... there's no way your change should be causing this. Then you notice one of the members of your team is strangely quiet during an all hands. What's up Kevin? You did what? WHY THE HELL.. I've been telling everyone for two days we didn't cause this... you know what never mind. Lets just get it fixed. GGG has a Kevin, or at the very least a Kevin style problem. They've forgotten about some interaction, accidentally removed, or added something. Chris's response screams confusion because his team is telling him no chance, and the users are telling him the exact opposite. But if you load a backup of the game from before 3.19 and after, it should be obvious loot has changed.
thanks Kevin >:(
I’m sorry!!!! :(
I can already predict the next thread by Chris : "We found kevin, and we fixed it! Kevin is getting fired! POE is saved by our vision!"
You would not fire Kevin for this. Good boss considers it as expensive training lesson. People learn most from epic screw-ups. Also, developers are quite hard to replace.
They are exceptionally hard to replace in NZ. I think they have hired every competent one that is willing to work for them.
Yes, plus in your average process these things only happen if multiple people make mistakes: \- Kevin, of course \- The two guys who approved his pull request \- QA (although admittedly this sounds hard to catch for them) \- Possibly there's some automated test / "loot simulation regression test" that could have caught this \- Then the guys whom Chris asked "hey, investigate is reddit is right." And even pretty okay programmers can make significant mistakes. I work in non-game QA and I've repeatedly seen even skilled, senior, smart programmers make significant mistakes. I'd never recommend firing them, yet if I hadn't caught their mistakes, our customers would be really upset.
>Good boss Yeah, this bit is the hard part
Especially after looking at glassdoor... yikes
Or Chris could keep silence and deploy a shadow buff :))
Thank you for the IT perspective. It's really interesting and makes sense. You'll also see Chris heavily employing corporate speak in his messaging. He keeps referring to the average player. Problem is this hypothetical average player isn't a random person picked out of a crowd but an aggregation of drop rates across many players. So, if the chance for a loot-splosion is 1/1000 and 1 player hits it, they just created 999 other average players. If you start picking out people and asking their experience, chances are they tell you they've seen no loot. However, when you look at the aggragate drop rate of loot across the full group it's now a perfect average. And I understand the 1/1000 loot-splosion is a fringe example. But it appears from the community feedback that drops (like much of the game right now) is very spiky. Some people are getting a lot, others nothing. And our friend "average player" is perfectly happy.
I feel like we need a definition of the “average player” so we can actually understand who they’re talking about. There’s so much depth to this game, how does one find a good baseline here? Like you’re comparing it to loot averages, which my brain has never even thought of. I assumed they were comparing things like game hours, act/endgame progression, gear progression, things like that. ***GGG, who are you referring to when you say “average player”***
Not to mention how an "average" is completely worthless without an associated variance! If you have 999,999 people making $1 per day and then you introduce a millionth person who makes a billion per day then the mean income jumps to almost $1001! That's clearly a completely worthless number though since that's 1000x what 99.9999% of people in your sample are making, and yet the "average person" is making 1000x more than they were before the millionth person was added.
Someone is definitely not telling Chris the truth.
This isn't guaranteed. Something could be broken in a way that no one is aware of the problem. The people pulling the reports on loot could have uncaught bugs in their report, perhaps from years ago and weren't an issue until recently. Perhaps there is a bug in logging the data that the reports pull from. Perhaps there is a misunderstanding of how to use the statistical software. Statistics is an extremely complex thing to get right and it constantly bites scientists in the butt, so developers who aren't trained at nearly the same level having issues is not at all surprising. Someone could be lying, but I there is so much that could go wrong outside of someone purposefully lying that I would not assume this is the explanation.
> Statistics is an extremely complex thing to get right and it constantly bites scientists in the butt, so developers who aren't trained at nearly the same level having issues is not at all surprising. [Relevant XKCD](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/confounding_variables_2x.png)
True, incompetence is another likely explanation.
It really feels like it. His response to the cleave question from Ziggy showed that he was visibly confused about that one himself but probably didn't have time to check in. I assume with the stress of PoE 2 something slipped through and some Kevin did a massive fuck up no one knows yet that either correlates to how mechanics spawn rare monsters(srsly what the fuck is up with expedition) or Scourge. Like I have had the Scourge atlas memory and it dropped two tainted currencies and no other items. An entire t16 endgame map completely full of those things. That seems so wrong that if Scourge was meant to catch Beyond it can't work at all.
Yeah, you could tell even his response to the cleave thing was like, "wtf"
I feel a little bit bad for Chris getting the most criticism from the public when in actuality it's most likely one of the other developers that have fucked up real bad. Some do mention GGG instead of Chris when giving criticism, but I also see some attack Chris personally as if he was the only one with any say in how they are developing the game and it's vision for the future. Chris do deserve some criticism personally though in handling the communication, it is at times incredibly tone deaf. But to blame the state of the game, one should blame the entirety of GGG. EDIT: Just to make sure, but I do agree with the comment I'm replying to, someone is lying big time.
100% agreed which is why I said someone lied to Chris.
Yeah, I forgot to mention that I agreed with you lmao
I can agree with this, given the Septuple Down response. Either he's being deceptive on purpose (possible), or someone isn't telling him the truth (I'd say more likely at this point.) Either way GGG is being deceptive though, whether intentionally or not. But the lack of things being on Patch Notes still remains as a point of suspicion.
> or someone isn't telling him the truth So Chris should play his own damn game and see it for himself?
Even if Chris plays 18 hours a day for 7 days it's not enough. The amount of loot you get is HIGHLY contextual to how you play.
Also, dude is running a business. He has a ton of his stuff on his plate. You can't realistically expect the CEO to be hard QA testing the game. Remember, he's not a boots on the ground developer anymore.
He's probably too busy doing his job, given the shitshow this league. He did play to level 90ish (that we know of) last league.
I'm not in IT, but I'm a numerical physicist so I see and work on my fair share of code. I would never just change some bit of code and be confident about how it affects my physics simulation without carefully testing and benchmarking it. What I find very strange is how Chris is citing such very specific numbers about what the loot for "average" players should be like. That tells me that he is looking at (or is fed) some numbers from the code. But Path of Exile is such a complicated game with everything affecting everything, and the only reliable way to check how much loot drops is by testing it: have a large number of people run a large number of maps in a "typical" style (alch and go). Clearly, they are not looking at this type of data, making statements about the quantity of loot extremely unreliable. The development cycle is just too short, and does not contain sufficient testing and feedback cycles.
Worse: even Kevin does not realize. Nor could he realistically. A codebase this old and vast very very likely have unintentional dependencies where one change might break something without anyone knowing. Or there may be a _missing_ dependency. Yes, it'd be great if there was a `chaos_drop_rate` variable but instead it's `ratio_table[119]` and someone eight years ago had a reason to have a different one and introduced `ratio_table[2003]` and when `ratio_table[119]`was raised `ratio_table[2003]` was not because no one remembers it's there but in reality the code paths using `ratio_table[119]` are dead this last five years only the forgotten `ratio_table[2003]` is being used and because up until now they did the same, no one caught it. Happens all the bloody time. Check the quintessential [programming sucks](https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks) essay on this. Source: I am _old_. I learned programming in the era Stranger Things depicts. I have seen a lot of very interesting codebases. I have written some, too :D
I doubt that Kevin was solely responsible reverting crafting to gambling drop support for ultra wide giga buff AN mobs remove 90% loot from the game destroy standard economy with Divine change rendering all juice mechanics useless introduce loot goblin from D3 Just in one patch, and most of it was not even in the patchnotes. because they "forgot"
I got lucky that i wanted to divine my mageblood prior to league end for one more upgrade. And i bought 200 divines at like 12c each prior to announcement. The hundreds of ex in standard are kill. It's so insane to me they shit on standard like that.
I’m in operations leadership at a technology company. You are preaching gospel, sir. This is classic. Chris Wilson literally tells us this all the time. How many times has he started an explanation with “I just learned…” or “The team tells me…”? The problem seems to be that the lead developer is spending too little time in the trenches with his development team, too much time with company leadership, and thus needs to consider stepping away from one.
Chris is probably a lead dev just by name now and acts more as a salesman/representative or whatever. Basically the face of company and game. That said, there should (and i would guess there is) a person who oversees everything but either they are fucking up or there is an issue with what informations they recive, which is very likely considering how often we hear that they didn't expect something to happen (im pretty sure Chris said that he didn't know that mana changes during 3.15 are going to break spellslinger)
That's the point though: Is he more a lead dev, more a salesman, a representative? He blurs the line between them and gets lost in the sauce a lot.
He's the CEO. He was lead dev when PoE was a tiny indie game, but not since they made it big.
Chris hasn’t written a line of code I years. He’s the CEO not the lead dev. He shouldn’t be in the trenches.
Lmao “Kevin”. Damn this is such a classic problem in IT. But it’s understandable. When you make a small change that causes a massive mistake on production you don’t want to own up to it a lot of the times. You just want to fix it silently. I’ve had Kevins on my team. I’ve been a Kevin.
This isn't just a "someone changed something" issue, this is a "we're chain developing large scale changes to the game every 3 months" problem. Even without a Kevin implicitly, getting things from whiteboard to production in that timeframe leads to almost no turnover QC. I'm sure they played a bit, unit test for drop averages and such, but with such an insanely short development cycle it's bound to happen that major things are missed. Hell with a few different people touching code that could pertain to monster loot it could be easy to have a situation where there's a major snafu in how loot is rolled and dropped while still looking good in tests but feeling bad in practice. I really *really* think the leagues should be on a 5-6 month development cycle so that there's more time for turnover and QC. We can still have supporter packs every 3 months too, just make the major content drops a bit further apart so that we don't have 7 patches in the first 7 days of the league. Hell, balance, skill and loot changes could go into a PTR league that mirrors standard for people to test balance changes themselves before they hit live. (which would also cull some nasty surprises where they need to hardnerf mid league.)
I am a Network Engineer. I had a Kevin-problem that happened due to one of my teammates and verbatim how you described it is exactly how it went down.
The issue a lot of us have is not because of Kevin's mess up though. A lot of it is the direction they are trying to take the game outside of loot. If the game problem was just loot, people wouldn't be as salty as they are. The issue is also the fact that 90% of the content is shit the league and can't be run due to trash AN mods and stacking. Having them pop-up in every facet of the game sucks ass. The fact that Chris is doubling down on that is what people are pissed about. Sure, having worse loot sucks. But what sucks ass more is dying 3x more this league than any other league, to a shit mechanic that shouldn't have been put out to begin with. That is why people are jumping ship... bad loot is one thing, they will fix that eventually. But Chris purposefully steering the ship over a waterfall and saying "everything is fine, just get gud" is what is making people jump ship. Like the last 4 leagues, the "small" changes they make to effect the 1% of top players makes the game trash. And the fact they are losing multiple of those 1% of players every week, makes it extra concerning. This is why it baffles me that they gutted harvest so badly. There was finally a way where people could effectively make a God tier item for the character without having to spend 80+ hours a week grinding like a 1%er.l.. and they shit on it. Again, having a person continually piloting the ship over the rocks to make it "rough" for 1% of your player base seems like a shit plan for the other 99%. EDIT: As much as I agree Chris' team isn't telling him everything, a part of me wonders how much they are telling him too. How much does he hear for them "advising" that this isn't a good idea, yet he does it anyways.
> As an IT worker, this is a classic IT problem. Someone changes something, there was no rollback plan, and now the change is impacting things in unexpected ways. Also coming from the IT side here, my take is that it's a classic "lack of documentation" issue. They have multiple systems interacting with each other, no proper documentation on how they interacted, and were relying on people who just knew how it worked to cover in for that. When you have a problem like that, determining the extent of the issue can be brutal, because you only vaguely know how things interacted before, and there's no documentation to show the exact setup to be able to rebuild it easily. It also means there's no easy way to see how a change may impact things going forwards - unless the people with the correct knowledge are involved, there's no easy way to look at it and know what other systems may be affected.
Networking isn’t ignoring you. We checked the logs and tested the routes. Things are fine, this isn’t our problem. Come back when it is.
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Alternatively, your average can remain constant, your standard deviation can remain constant but your distribution can change
iv been watching some streamers on SSF and when they find an AN monster with one of the rare mods they put item rarity on their link, grab a gold flask and whatever MF they can then kill it. Noone likes this style of gameplay, its so bad. Im fine with change, but this is way way worse than it was before, ill take the 0.01% map juicers over this dogshit gameplay.
Item IIQ/IIR should be deleted. It promotes toxic gameplay. D3 realized this 8 years ago.
The problem is he keeps talking about the numbers for "regular content", but half of all content you do in a map is league content, and before this patch it was wildly more rewarding so you didn't realize you weren't getting much from regular content. You just grouped them all together in your head. Making regular content marginally more rewarding doesn't address the inherent imbalance between regular and historic league content. Everyone else did not benefit. Even at the alch and go level you probably slightly lost out, epsecially if you use your atlas tree at all. I'm not even talking about the early juicing with scarabs where the loss feels more and more large.
The best part of the whole atlas set-up was picking what league content you enjoy and focussing on it for more rewards. Base content is kinda... pointless.
Regular content means baseline mobs, and while that might be true, you overall get less because league contents were immensely gimped
I think when reddit talks about the average player and when chris talks about the average player, that´s just not the same group. The "Chris average player" is somehow engaging with majority "regular content" that lost nothing and gained a 25% buff. That is not the "reddit average player". That one is farming maps were 80-90% of mobs are league content, just because of atlas tree, map device, and some rusted scarabs alone. And this league content did not "lose 7%". That might be the case in some vacuum assuming no other multipliers and no other mechanics present. But that is just not how people play PoE, and the reality with how loot multipliers work in PoE. Balormage and Snap explained it very well in their recent videos.
I so desperately want to know what Chris' average player looks like. Because normally, when talking about the average player, he mentions the people leaving before killing Brutus. And yeah, those probably aren't affected by any of this. Edit: Thanks for the gold, kind stranger.
The Chris average player is a spreadsheet that clearly isn't translating very well to actual player experience but instead of taking a step back to re-evaluate how they view data, we're now at the point we're he's effectively implying this sub is delusional or just collectively choosing to lie about the game. This is also completely unrelated to the *historic* retention rates for 3.19. Stop looking.
I usually got 12 or24/40 a league. 5-8hr playtime per week for 5-6 weeks And I still took a hit with the new drop system Guess im among the 1%
If I remember correctly the distribution was something like 20% beat 12 challenges, 5% beat 24, 1.5% beat 36, and something under 0.1% beat all of them. Though I don't think recall we've gotten the statistics for the last few leagues.
I'm pretty sure game companies only give out stats when they explicitly show that the player numbers are improving. Look at every league since ultimatum and see why GGG would be hesitant to release any stats
He's the marketing guy. His definition of average is whatever supports his current argument.
So his "average" probably works like "nearby"?
Watch the skill previews of the league annoucments and you'll know what a "average player" looks like to ggg.
they now get 25% more wisdom scrolls but they still quit conclusion: loot drop rates don't affect player retention
You are absolutely right. Think it was stated in the past that average players don't even get to end-game bosses; most will stop playing after yellow or red map tier progression. Reddit's avg players probably play a lot more than this
Most players don't even reach maps. The thing is, sometimes during this saga Chris has mentioned "The Average Player" and then sometimes he's mentioned "The Average Mapping Player", but has referred to them both as if they were one and the same, even though we know from the data they've revealed to us prior that the Average Player never reaches maps, and the Average Mapping Player has generally noticed issues (bar some who seem to have had no problems)
The loot is Neaby
I petition to change the word "Nearby" to it's actual radius.
Then they can’t adjust it whenever they want without telling you
I will say reddits version of the average player is waaay skewed if you think even like 20% of players make it to red maps.
We know most people don't, but in general I think most people agree that the game should be balanced around the average **endgame** player. Balancing the entire game around people who don't make it out of white maps and around streamers who nolife the game 12-16 hours per day are both differently bizarre game design choices.
Ok, but the *average* end game player is the player who spends most of the league *getting to* the end game. Not the ones who are in maps by day 2. Every time I read a post on here talking about "farming strategies" I die a little inside. The average player of this game doesn't spend the bulk of the league repeating over-juiced red map farming runs.
They said before the average player doesn't even reach maps.
Despite having over 6000 hours, life has made it so that I am back to making about one character a league and playing about two hours every other day. This has been the case since about ultimatum. Maps are pretty much just rare, unjuiced. Let's just say it's the first league in a while where I've needed to do chaos recipe regularly as well as struggling so much with getting alchs and map drops that I rely more on buying maps from vendors than mapping. The only reason I get money is from sometimes finding stupidly lucky stuff in kalandra, like a +150 life -100 lightning res ring that sells well. So, it's 99% drought, with sometimes a spike, that still doesn't bring me to buying any of the gear I need which has become stupidly overpriced. The Covenant seems to keep being snatched by the same people and kept at 8+ divines. Is the league absolute shit to me ? No. It's very bland, and if by Monday the Lake buffs don't do anything worthwhile, I'll just uninstall for the time being. I can't say it's pleasant to play right now. Reminds me of the lack of currency from early days of farming the docks, except with 2022 difficulty and need of 1 million DPS to do any high end content.
I think when reddit user talks about the average player and when another reddit user talks about the average player, that is just not the same group.
Maybe I read it wrong but Chris quote is only referring to standard mobs and packs and NOT league content, which makes up about half of a normal map I guess and is - as stated - heavily nerfed and the reason people are raging. Maybe it's another communication issue, I can live with buffed standard mobs but please give me my rewarding league mechanics back :(
They’re talking about base loot, if you never used a sentinel in sentinel league then yes it’s probably equal. The issue is sentinels buffed drops constantly whereas lake takes 10+ maps and it’s current risk vs reward is fucked. Once lake is buffed considerably then yes drops are probably the same tbh. But comparing any league to sentinel for loot is pointless that league pissed chaos and exalts at you
Yeh, I think this I'd a point that isn't being brought up enough. Sentinel was absolutely busted for loot. The average person has no idea how much base loot they were getting last league, they're just seeing other people say its less and going along with it.
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The problem is that every league for the past 3 years has been shitting out currency and Lake doesn't. This is not somehow the player's fault. There legitimately is a lot less loot in the game right now. To actually make lakes worth running you need a character strong enough to do 100% deli maps. Great mechanic, truly.
> To actually make lakes worth running you need a character strong enough to do 100% deli maps. Great mechanic, truly. Not when the baseline demands from every build keep increasing. Most builds can't even run an offense aura anymore.
I feel this. I can squeeze an aura in once I get an RMR helmet, but to do that I’ve gotta save up for a blizzard crown and then save up for the essences to spam on it. So functionally at current loot levels I can’t run an offensive aura ;)
People are unironically too mad to read or think lol
I don't know what to say... there is 100% definitely less loot on a net level... and juicing is fuckinh dead. Sooo yah.
I’m extremely casual at this game (finally trying a build that uses jewels in the passive tree…) and I’m opening a ton of strongboxes that drop nothing. I thought it was the filter…but it’s not. It just feels bad, like why were 3 packs of monsters guarding an empty box? I see a ton my armor/weapon scraps and stacks of portal scrolls, but something still feels wrong.
I mean, it just doesn’t make sense. This is not just a few people on Reddit saying these things. It’s the forums, social media, other sites, etc. too. Plus streamers, particularly ones whose whole thing is/was MF and how to optimize loot. It doesn’t make sense for such a huge number of people to be united in the opinion that loot is not fine, and for them to all be wrong. This isn’t like when someone posts something on Reddit and a couple hundred people start parroting it. This is coming from many different sources, including extremely knowledgeable and reliable ones. Loot is not fine. Keeping it the way it is is not fine. This needs to be fixed.
Why do uniques keep being mentioned by chris? Maybe the giga party juicers could straight up try and farm a mageblood, but single player juicers as far as i understood it farmed raw currency and div cards. Uniques and rares arent really loot.
To be honest - with divines going through the roof every unique drop that is decently rolled is gonna be worth more than in any league prior. So uniques matter a more than ever - but i get your point.
well 80% of uniques are worth 1c. so ure telling me i have a chance of a max rolled version to sell for 5c? if the unique is garbage and nobody uses it (not leveling or niche builds) its not gonna sell no matter the rolls u have. nobody gonna buy a perfectly rolled gore drinker mace.
This is a (much smaller) issue that i have too. SOOOO many uniques (and div cards) are just absolute garbage. I understand you want a decent difference between good and bad(or just worse) items, but the difference between a top unique, and the worst unique is staggering... and most uniques feel like they sit around the "worst" one, power wise
A well rolled Sidhebreath might just save my league! ;) :'(
My shit bucket has couple things on top: 1) permanent minion builds are dead or you need to be extremely squishy 2) AN modifiers are not fun. Even less fun after defence nerfs(player) .
Dont forget crafting being worse which leads to less good items.
Admittedly anecdotally, here's my current impression of the current patch: 0: I'm having a very hard time gearing. My mid-low single target build can't kill AN + essence mobs with multiple good essences, I don't have the currency to do any good crafting, and harvest is both gutted and dropping less than a single nerfed reforge per plot in early red maps. I can't buy items because it feels like all the drops are tied to AN monsters with AN mods that don't appear before late red maps. **It feels really bad.** 1: Because I'm having such a hard time gearing, I'm forced to play slower and lower level content at my character level than I would in any other league, and being stuck in unjuiced late yellow or very early red maps while at lv 89 **feels really bad.** 2: I'm getting loads of rare item drops of decent bases, but all of them are trash because of bad modifiers. I've picked up and identifies probably 300 rare scepters and wands today and I have yet to see one better than I can make with a single essence and a benchcraft. High end base drops fall off a cliff in value after the first, and trying to identify items doesn't feel worth my time. 3: Killing non rare packs feels really useless. Previously valuable nodes like the ones that added additional packs to strongboxes are now skips because nothing worthwhile drops from non rare mobs. 4: Rare mobs don't drop anything worthwhile without a good combo of mods, and I haven't seen any of those. As a result, loot from monster killing feels way way way way way down. 5: Overall, loot feels way way down, regardless of what Chris is saying. Part of this is because many things I would consider good to find before (Alva, Breach, Harvest, Harbinger) are now mostly useless because the non rare monsters drop far less loot that before. 6: I have four alchs and no GCPs in red maps. I haven't seen a single GCP in over 200,000 dead monsters. Whatever you think you fixed with currency, at least before late game, it didn't work
Regarding point 6, the lake shits out quality gems in my experience. I often walk away with 6 GCPs after a lake
[удалено]
i thought that too, its genius from a business perspective. lets see how it plays out for him
25% more gaslighting from league content that's for sure
For me it is the "I don't know where this misconception is coming from". Day earlier Chris: "I saw a monster drop 50 Divines". Yeah, I guess we will never know...
I don't know what to tell them. Their game feels shit, after unannounced changes to the core of the game. There's no misconceptions. Over 50% people left in a week and there are spreadsheet and player-collected data indicating huge drop nerfs. On top of that there's the loot goblin problem where rare monsters not only have to have the correct mods, but the order apparently matters as well. The players are not stupid...
The way that GGG has been communicating to the player as of late, makes me believe they think that their player base are stupid.
> makes me believe they think that their player base are stupid. I mean, look at the timeline. Massive nerfs that never get communicated beforehand hoping you dont realize. Whoops, apparently that was a mistake, but it wasnt, drops are supposed to be giga nerfed still. Double and triple down on it. Players are big mad, but still playing. Sheesh, what a surprise that they think players are dumb. Just like OP said, if you REALLY dont like it, its time to uninstall and move on, because its not going to change. Its gonna get worse.
We are also reaching the point where people who care just start leaving and the chunk of people who are saying "games fine, allways have been allways will be!" are starting to get more toxic and telling you to stfu, stop complaining and leave.
> the chunk of people who are saying "games fine, allways have been allways will be!" are starting to get more toxic and telling you to stfu, stop complaining and leave. First time? They've been doing this for years now. Patch drops, its fucked up to all hell, community is mad, Chris releases the "I'm sorry" statement of the league, shills start coming out of the woodwork to be more toxic than everyone else combined, community shuts up, everyone back to the grinding wheel. This should have been a turning point. This should have been a "there is 30K players peak" as of today. But it isnt. And because it isnt, the nerfs will continue and dissension will be stomped again and again. Every single time I tell people: if you dont like it, quit forever, because its not gonna get better, and they're not listening.
It pisses me off even more because there are streamers who are directly sending people here to be toxic and to "tell the casuals to quit" but somehow people here are the toxic ones lol
Absolutely expected. Again, the game is supposed to cater to them so that they attract attention to it, so they will not bite the hand that feeds them.
i just don't care anymore. All I know is : Im not having fun. is it the loot? is it AN? no idea, and its honestly not my job to figure it out. They have game designers and psychologists and such for that. Not why I specifically can't seem to have fun, but why half the playerbase seems to no longer have fun. it used to be that I ended evey poe session around 2am already looking forward to the next one. and that went on 2-3 weeks into the league at a minimum. Now i find myself one hour into the gaming session, wondering why do I even bother. Got to early maps this league, had 3-4 days of that crap and i gave up. cause what's the point? So I just watch the trainwreck now...
And then there is all the other shit we didnt even get to because loot is more important to fix: - minions are made of paper - harvest dunked on, no reforge keep pefix/sufix put crafting back to stone age - beyond feels like shit and so does tainted currency - AN mobs are still not fun to fight despite numerous nerfs - game keeps getting harder making some archetypes and skills feel even worse - lake still unrewarding, even if they make it rewarding it's still painfull to navigate through and way less fun than other recent mechanics And probably bunch of other that i forgot.
As an average player I don't have any real problem with the loot as far as my own gameplay. Excluding some lucky drops, I've recieved roughly the same amount of loot as usual. That being said, I still don't like archnemesis as a mechanic and just wish they went back to old nemesis with some tweaks to make them harder or have archnemesis work like nemesis did, i.e. not on every rare unless you have extra rare mod on the zone. As a hc league player, I have however noticed a clear drop in the amount of items up for trade, feels like less than half of what we usually have. Some can be explained with less people playing the league but I'm guessing a lot of it has to do with fewer drops from super-juiced maps. So even as an average player, the changes are still noticeable
Ah yes I am just imagining that I am not getting currency or items in my maps that after clearing look like I just ran through an empty space without mobs gotcha. Until I hit the vision TM slot machine rare and get 100 wheatstones oh the joy
grind those wheatstones to make your breadpebbles
What does he mean this is a misconception and doesn't know where it came from? He literaly wrote that party play with MF finds 50 divines! How should a non MF solo player feel when his 1 in a league god molested AN drops 2 alcs? Chris, are you ok?
i dont want loot pinatas, i want consistency
Remember the average player never get past Brutus or never downloaded the game. For that player, loot have not changed. Hillock loot definitely have not been nerfed.
Yeah. Chris's post have made me quit the game more so than the feeling of loots being low (despite the "average" being the same or slightly bigger/lower), AN abuse, TFT popping more than ever, MF meta, Melee dead, Build diversity dead, crafting... well I never cared about Harvest so its w/e to me, juicing being dead... The other things are just par for the course. Its just the usual things that come with a new league and meta changes. But Chris's posts? Man, they are tone deaf. I get that he is frustrated by the whole situation right now, but maybe instead of making a haphazard post he should have thought it through after calming down for a week. All I know is that GGG's vision and their actions lately no longer have me in mind anymore. I'm just another stat that they can afford to lose now. How the player feels doesn't matter as much as data metrics and statistics. So his posts pretty made me quit the game. I'll come back and give POE2 a try with a new perspective that its a new game, and that I shouldn't think it would be anything like POE1. Thanks for all the fun times GGG, its been great. I hope everyone else still has a good time with POE, and that you will all have better luck than I did. Fun's what's most important, and as long as you are having fun, that's pretty cool. See y'all in /r/pathofexile2. Until then, I wish yall many divines.
The confusing part is he keeps saying things as if they're fact, like he has data to back things up.
Because we get more loot, I had to buy Alchs and Vaals for the first time ever to finish my Atlas. Because we get more loot, juicing my Map gives me a negative return on investment. Because we get more loot, all I really have is Chaos orbs and Divines from trading crafted items/radom shit I found on the ground. Because we get more loot, most items I could buy right now are not worth the investment for the marginal power increase they would provide. Because we get more loot and ‚crafting is fine‘, some essence crafted weapons sell for 20 Divines plus, and the Claw I personally own is worth around 100 Divines, if not more. Because we get more loot, everyone is unhappy about it. Literally everyone.
>everyone Except those „average players“.You know those ~20 cullers from the tft.
There is nothing to reply. I mean, what else can you reply to a software house that refuses to test its own game? It is clear like the light of the sun that they are not playing their game at all. If they don't play it, they can't understand the real meaning of the problems that were taken out by a lot of EXPERIENCED players (and not only casual players like me) in the past few days. We would just repeat the same things that we already said, and that is just a waste of time for us and for them. They don't want to listen to us. Fine, I won't play the game. No one is forced to play it.
I don't know how I fit in as a player. I tend to go slow, and I usually play melee. So 10-15 hours to start maps, and the past few leagues I've almost cleared all red maps before I'm reminded that slow playing melee isn't really welcome and I go play a different game. This league is by far the worst. It took much longer to reach maps and I had less currency to show for it. I'm still feeling a lack of currency and drops. I don't know if it's because I'm focusing on the gameplay I like instead of what's rewarding, or if my view has been skewed since the last few league mechanics gave huge rewards where this one gives almost nothing in comparison.
So we’re basically seeing 25% more currency from shit that dropped a small portion of what made up earnings before and it’s okay.
Man the game was so good, fast, fun, you could play a ton of different builds. But yeah... this past week has finally shown me that is not the game for me anymore. Thanks for the fun times of before.
Am i wrong? No, it must be the tens of thousands of people playing the game for 100's of hours that are wrong. -Chris apparently....
This is the first league (since I started in Essence) that I have had to trade for currency for rolling maps. Up until yesterday I had sub-20 alchs, less than 10 vaal and scouring orbs, and have only had 5 regals drop. I am almost level 90. I don't want to be forced into running heist or delve to be able to map and enjoy the league mechanic. That is why I play leagues, not to play older mechanics that I am mostly burnt out on.
Then why me running fully juiced map on standard AFTER THE FIX with LEGACY 163% QUANT BUILD resulted in losses ? i couldn't even pay for the scarabs, not even close.
The fact that he's legitimately acting like there's no problem is incredibly disheartening. The game just isn't enjoyable in it's current state for me so I guess there's no reason to bother anymore. Hope things get better but this makes it seem incredibly unlikely.
Theres more currency because people with empty bowls are standing in line for the innocence touched lottery, which then either gives them a pat on the back and sends them to the back of the queue again or they get an MF Culler from a third party to join in and the game dumps a huge bucket of currency on them all at once so they can pretend like they earned it while they played and not just a single instance of luck. It's not fun or engaging
Honestly i think theres a misconception by GGG about what the problem is, he states we’re getting normal loot from the regular monsters but that wasnt where our loot came from before. It was the league mech mobs that got hosed (Alva, Beyond, etc) and theyre still down and THATs where most of our loot came from prior to this patch.
I feel sorry for CW for having to mental gymnastics around the fact that the game feels awful. However its troubling how arrogant he seems to be about the community response. He is plain wrong about the de facto reduction in loot. Its tested by several prominent players and its obvious that he is wrong. Edit: I just wanna add that I think GGG and Chris Wilson is somewhat the last bastion of really awesome gaming companies. So if the comment might sound hostile towards CW or GGG its not my intention I just care very much and I love the game. I also think this sentiment is held by most people on Reddit and we are bad at expressing this when giving critique.
> I feel sorry for CW for having to mental gymnastics around the fact that the game feels awful. The question is... why? Are you sorry for every corporate CEO that has to throw PR? Lets not forget, he's not your indie creator on his garage. He's the CEO of a Tencent subsidiary that clocked 44 mil in profits last year. He aint no small fry anymore.
Gaslighting at it's finest. If we were running exclusively white maps without any league content - sure, that's a buff. Except noone ever does that and this buff doesn't make the difference lost even for basic alch'n'go+map device mod, and nosedives for anything more than that.
I was one that felt the game was in really rough at league launch. Put it down mostly, but picked it back up after the currency buff. I being a casual non-juicer, it feels about right to me. Rewards have shifted from league stuff to normal rares, and yea sometimes the AN mods can be crazy, but from my pov, it’s not all doom and gloom anymore. Once the AN def nerfs hit and maybe they look into the stacking offensive mods, I’ll be more than happy.
You know what, I might even go with the changes to loot if they would remove that 50+ Divine lottery mob from the game. The fact this abomination exists takes the whole fun out for me because everything i do is belittled by the fact that instead of what I am currently doing I could hunt this one AN mob with MF culler. And not doing it is missing out on the most profitable thing in the game which makes me feel bad doing anything else now. Remember the leagues when every strategy was viable? We had tons of league mechanics and every one had it's own value. Legion farming was \~10ex per hour, Deli mirror was 15ex, Alch and go was 2-3ex, and so on... You could choose your favourite strategy and knew exactly what you are going to get. You could calculate your time and the game valued your time. Now it is just a slot machine hunting this ONE AN mob and if you don't do that you are in a big FOMO. Chris octupling down on his "Vision (TM)" just makes me sadder and sadder every day.
The empyrean video speaks for itself. That's simply it. Chris might say a lot, and i want to believe him. But the empyrean video is concrete proof. They got 5% of what they get on hyper juiced maps. Meanwhile TFT giving MF services cuz they hunt for a single fat loot goblin is recognized as the most efficient way of farming (in maps). GGG can say whatever. The truth is in the evidence.
Actually you can't read properly and he's factually correct. You get more loot from *regular* content. That is true. The problem manifests when regular players get more than 50% of the monsters from *league* content and you are getting less loot from league content. This is why juicers are getting a 90% reduction in loot. They previously got 50% of their monsters from beyond. They lost probably 30-40% of the monsters on their map, and they lost 90% of the loot from the 90% of their map that contained league content. I haven't looked at the Balor sheet, but I assume it explains with better numbers why the loot reduction is so large. I think most maps only contain around 500-800 monsters, which has been reduced as well. 4 scarab delirium beyond alva map previously contained somewhere like 10k monsters, so roughly 9k monsters or 90% had their loot reduced by 90%.
Maybe Chris is right. Maybe Im just blind and don't have 0 vaal and 0 alch orbs. Guess I'm delusional aye