[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)
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" This was made a while ago, either in a video or over a year ago. I don't recall where it was. " Quality is a function of stress testing. They are human. Certain humans will notice things other humans do not. By attritting the process, you're more likely to find issues. I'm not really going to get further into the speculation of how well they do or don't test things because quite frankly, we just don't know. Jul 27, 2011 - Sept 30, 2018.
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Have a few things to add to the Serleth / Hankinsohl conversation.
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A few more things to keep in mind. GGG's goals are likely to produce a free to play game that grows in player size as fast as possible, and entices the largest portion of that player base to donate money. As players, we want a game that is balanced at least as well as the rest of the stuff on the market that we are interested in playing. These goals are *usually* aligned, however, what is best for one is not always what is best for the other. I'm with Serleth in that you need some bad skills / gear - the wide range makes players with top end gear feel better, and players without that gear strive harder for it. Not every skill needs to be end-game viable. Every skill should have use case where it shines, but those are vastly different. A skill can be end game viable, easy for new players to master, good for party play, good for solo play, good for low level xp, etc. Some players want to challenge all the available content. Some want to play PVP. Some want to magic find. Some want to generate currency - and so on. Most players want a few of those. Take our favourite build, for instance - Serleth's CA MF Scion. Do we start with CA at level 1? Hell no. CA sucks hairy donkey nuts at level 1. So, we start with Searing Bond, or Magma Orb, or whatever, then switch to CA later. For us, Searing Bond only needs to be viable for the first ~50 levels. Meta. There's *always* going to be some. So, throwing a bunch of effort into stamping it out is at best a waste of resources. At worst, it's a rabbit hole you can pour everything into without any results. Instead, they are better off to try to control it - which they currently do reasonably well with timeboxed leagues and the nerf hammer. Imagine they have a goal of keeping a meta to a single league - how does that affect their customer base? It means the meta players can't just rinse and repeat every league - they have to dig, figure out what they think will be the meta, and most of them will be wrong, abandon that toon and create a new one 3-7 days into the league. So the vast majority of the meta players will play a week longer each league? As far as GGG is concerned, that's a win. Every decent company puts together an analysis of their user types and possible goals - noob, kid, experienced player, etc - and their bucket lists - storyline, maps, endgame, ladder contender, 40 challenges, gear collector, etc - and everything they decide to assign resources to should satisfy as many of those pairings as possible. We tend to look at this from the perspective of the experienced player who wants to generate in-game currency, however, the 13 year old kid that never finishes Cruel mode is also important to them. Especially if he has currency and is willing to spend it! Bottom line on meta - I would be completely un-surprised to learn that a constantly changing meta is deliberately planned into each league. Current league IGN: Teldra_Anc_LAD
Feel free to message me in game if I'm on. |
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" I could go into this quite in depth - software quality has been my profession for 20+ years, however, I'll try to keep it short. ;) Bugs have a natural distribution across severity and likelihood. All development teams tend to create about the same percentage of crash vs cosmetic, for example. Given that the bugs we face in POE are non-critical - the game doesn't crash, the servers don't crash, our player data isn't corrupted, etc, etc, I can emphatically say this game is rather well tested. The issues that we *do* face are game balance, supporting skills that are triggered when they should not be, items dropping in places where they cannot be picked up, etc. These are not bugs that any product owner would (or should!) stop a deployment over. Development teams don't attempt to ship a bug free product - they try to ship a product with the *right* bugs, the ones that don't impact the customers badly enough to affect satisfaction levels. Bugfixing past a certain point is cost prohibitive - even mission critical software that can kill people if it fails badly - air traffic control, NASA, etc - is only tested for double fault bugs at most. Short... ish, anyway. :D Current league IGN: Teldra_Anc_LAD
Feel free to message me in game if I'm on. |
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" Interesting. Thanks for the insight. Jul 27, 2011 - Sept 30, 2018.
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My 2c on design/testing:
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I've heard in several places that GGG developed a lot of their design philosophy from Mark Rosewater, head developer of Magic the Gathering... I used to read a lot of his articles back in the day... and play the game before I decided it was too much of a moneysink...
Magic the Gathering is basically designed around meta rotation... new expansions come out every 3 months... and in the new model rotate out in a year's time (used to be 2yrs)... ARPGs can't just rotate out skills/content in the same way, but they do comparable things with balance that MTG can't do to card balance directly... MTG also has several testing errors in their past... mostly linked to deck control... Skullclamp back in Mirrodin gave a creature +0/-1 and allowed a card draw on death, which was OP since you could equip to a 1/1 creature/token and basically get cards for free on repeat... and a few years later with the Planeswalkers and Jace, Mind Sculptor... I remember hearing that card was so expensive ($100) you could buy packs/boxes of cards and sell that 1 card back and make money or cut even... And I kinda hope HoWA stays... wouldn't mind playing it again... really enjoying ST... and I've read a few things secondhand that say people think devs have implied Breaches will stick around in some form. (convoluted, I know) |
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Prediction Time :-)
Make 3 predictions for next league.
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Good stuff from Serleth, Grimjack (never knew that you were software QA) and Piros on my previous thread. Just for fun, I'm going to make a few predictions for next league. What are your predictions? 1. Clear Speed Will Continue to be Extremely Important Why?
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I think GGG has nailed it this league. Certainly player participation is up. GGG rightly changes things from league to league - perhaps unintentionally - searching for what's popular. The clearspeed meta this league has been extremely popular - thus, I expect more of the same next league. At the same time, development for the next league began way before the popularity of the current league was known. So probably mob-density will be shoe-horned into the next league somehow. Moreover, I expect challenges to require even more time commitment next league than this league - why? Because GGG needs high player participation throughout the league - so the 36-challenge reward next league will involve at least one time-sync and that time-sync will be even more time consuming than Breach league. 2. Race Rewards Will Be Far Better Why?
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In spite of this league's popularity - player participation trends continue. High at league start... tailing off as the league continues... and dropping substantially in the 3rd month. GGG will likely try to address this somehow... maybe race rewards will be better is my best guess. Another possibility - shorter leagues. But, I don't think that this will happen - GGG doesn't have the resources to turn out 2-month leagues with high quality. 3. The Best Skill Next League Will Require a New (Probably League-Specific) Unique Why?
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Beta testing is broken and GGG doesn't seem to realize it. Virtually no one will beta test new items given how (I think) beta testing now works. As a result, one or more items will be far too powerful - but not adequately beta tested since it won't be obvious that the item(s) are so good and because you'll need to go out of your way to get some not-obviously good items during beta test. In contrast to this - new skills, will be thoroughly vetted. It will likely be obvious that a new skill is OP and, as such, these skills will attract a bunch of beta testers. And even if not obvious, trying out a new skill has no barrier - equip the gem and go from there - as opposed to testing a new unique - you've first got to acquire the item, and then build around it. If a new skill is actually OP, beta feedback will cause it to be nerfed - either immediately from testers... or from the community at large when new content sharing is approved. That said, one or more new skills will likely be Tier 1 - otherwise, virtually no one will play them. Editado por útlima vez por hankinsohl#1231 en 10 feb. 2017 1:05:03
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" Me too :-). Next league development began long ago - before the popularity of this league was known. So Breach inclusion, if it occurs, will be something simple as there won't be a lot of dev time to implement this. My guess - Breaches will occur but with less frequency - basically the same treatment given to Essences. With respect to HoWA - it's going to get the nerf bat - no way escaping this. Post-nerf will it still be worth pursing? Yes, I think so. But some other new item will almost certainly eclipse the nerfed HoWA. |
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" They've already hinted at in the SF meetup posts on reddit that Breaches are likely to be either sextant or Zana mods, or something similar. I think it'd be a mistake for it to not go core completely, but if it doesn't, that'll mean that HoWA probably won't be nerfed on the basis of its increased exclusivity. It'll end up being a chase item worth probably 10s of ex early on. Hell, even if it does get the Essence treatment, I wouldn't expect an adjustment. Instead of multiple breaches per map, you'd be getting one breach every 5 maps, making Esh farming significantly more rare. In and of itself, that might be enough to warrant not touching it; since GGG is prone to adjusting drop rarity without notification, you might see that get bumped in order to keep the item even more chase without requiring any changes to the item itself. *shrug* Wait-and-see for me. My only prediction is that Mathil will make 1c items worth half-exalts again :P Jul 27, 2011 - Sept 30, 2018. Editado por útlima vez por Serleth#4392 en 10 feb. 2017 2:45:12
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Grats on 40, Piros!
" Chris said it in the Lioneye's Watch Podcast, the episode with massive flask changes announced for 3.0. He said it not just about skills, but uniques and other things as well. Hank, I don't think Blight is one of the bad skills right now. People are doing really nice things with it in PvM and it's an instant killer in PvP if you have a way to get close to the caster/LA/EA. It's just unpopular because it's not clear speed meta, and clear speed sucks anyway! |
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" Nice memory. Thanks for sourcing it. I thought it was less recent than that. Jul 27, 2011 - Sept 30, 2018.
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