Development Manifesto: Delirium Improvements

"We now have a couple of computers in the office that reliably reproduce problems so we're using those to debug it." ie, they went shopping for shit computers XD

Can you please fix Cassia? You can't click her if you make a second char in the league :(

27 pages in, I'm not sure my response will even count as feedback.

I'm not a pro player, and this content is already more dangerous than most of the stuff I've played and not as rewarding.

In Metamorph, I died a bunch to one-shot metamorph bosses, but, in general it was worth it. I knew what reward I was going to get before the encounter started and it helped me understand what I was getting into.

This is mostly just random, I don't know what I'm going to get before hand, and even when I build the rewards up to 5 or 6 stacks (I don't know how this compares to others, but this is DAMN hard for me.) it doesn't feel like I'm getting amazing rewards.

The fog effect, feels laggy. I mean, you have the benchmarks to tell me otherwise and that it doesn't affect performance, etc, and I haven't sat down and looked at my FPS during the encounter because I'm really forced to not pay attention to content at all and just zerg my way through the map after I trigger one, but it doesn't feel good regardless of what those numbers are.

I'm not a fan of this league.

The vacuuming not being a core mechanic of how an action RPG should function, I hear what you're saying, but, you've REALLY designed a mechanic that is counter to what you claim. Let me remention the above. I am not a pro player, I'm not fast at this, and even with a loot filter, it's very hard to avoid a delirium pack, grab a thing, and continue to do well on the mechanic. The only option is to ignore all the loot, finish the encounter, and backtrack an empty map to pick up loot. It's not fun.

I rarely post, comment, or otherwise.

I do spend lots of money on POE. I doubt I spend even close to the most, but, I am a paying customer.

I do not like the direction that this league indicates that the game is going.

Metamorph was thoughtful and strategic, you were able to intelligently weight risk and reward.

Delirium is not. It's random, risky, and does not feel rewarding.

I get that there are players that trivialize content.

I also feel like I understand that PoE is a 'hardcore' game. I understand that I will never be capable of doing some content, period. Being left out of the majority of an entire league, however, feels bad.

"

We now have a couple of computers in the office that reliably reproduce problems so we're using those to debug it.

Tencent money put to good use. A Q&A department with more than a handful of popular HW configurations.

You guys really missed the point though...Just remove the time limit as it serves literally no purpose. There is no benefit for it existing and only makes it so speed builds rein supreme once again. Let people go slow, let people play how they want with this content. If there wasn't a timer at all then people would be able to pick stuff up as they go which was a complaint. Let people decide when to end the encounter due to difficulty rather than an arbitrary time limit you decided was needed in a game mechanic once again to punish players that don't build super speedy characters to zip through content.


Honestly what is the reason behind your teams obsession with adding time limits to content to force being fast is the only viable option to engage fully? Metamorph while it had it's quirks was super refreshing as there wasn't any time limit, you did it at your own pace and I thought maybe you guys had figured it out and yet here we are again...

Really huge disappointment for me.

"

"For those interested in why we use On-Death effects in content like this, it's because they are a viable way of making monsters that are killed instantly have an effect on players, and they aren't trivialised by clear-speed."

Thank you for clearing that up! Despite what Dev's always say in interviews, in production this is how you think you can do "balance" :o

"

"extremely high quantity/rarity bonuses"

uhm, any normal blight encounter gives more + better rewards than any delirium.

Thank you for the information and all the work <3

"

For those interested in why we use On-Death effects in content like this, it's because they are a viable way of making monsters that are killed instantly have an effect on players, and they aren't trivialised by clear-speed. Few to no other mods we can put on these monsters make any difference normally because they are eradicated by powerful builds in seconds.

Instead of putting a band-aid on the problem by spending time designing one-shot, on-death mechanics that are grey on a grey background in order to inflate the number of player deaths how about you:

balance the game such that it is IMPOSSIBLE for "powerful builds to eradicate everything in seconds"

I've skipped all Delirium mechanics and don't plan to start doing them. Good league, GGG!

I really don't get how GGG gets it own philosophy wrong.

It's one thing to say you don't like the speed of the game in certain aspects at your developer conference. Why then make a league where having movement speed or the ability to move is huge to being effective. At the very least don't sit there and nerf flash dash saying balance then doing what you did, yet how many are gonna acknowledge this.

Kudos on getting mapping sustain nice for once and currency should be easy for anyone at this point in the game.

My beefs at this point are QOL

for a 3 month league solid releases are need or don't bother.I know why it's 3 months but the polish on just about everything since breach has been wonky.

I've stated multiple tmes your network infrastucture hinders everyone from your services the game needs to the game itself by using a fifo architecutre. Seriously you're entire network runs on 1 link when it can run on 4 with fully respected packet priority and generation speed in microseconds. DDOS protection and latency load protection as well can be done, it's not a gimmick but you'd have to work something like riot has done for two games now.

Where's our money going, fine some want more gear to look at I just want my game to work, not stutter so much, not rubber band, and not glitch out. Where's our QOL patch for things that effect the base of the game operates.

Here's a real complaint that has little to do with the fps and more to do with the need for vaccuming. If you're not gonna give us vaccuming how about you fix how text is rendered relative to where an item is. How about you actually fix why players misclick so frequently, how about them stats. The time everyone would save if we didn't click on loot at times the way we do.

Better than D3 or D4 are gonna be and not as glitchy wolcen. We can do better than what's coming and what's out there.

The overall problem is that these issues are pretty consistent in every league at launch. Is there a plan to not have risk/reward, visibility, and back tracking issues going forward?

On the back tracking, yes ARPGs don't usually item vacuum for you, but they also don't usually stick timers in that say run around and kill as much as you can as quick as you can or you lose out. If you add that kind of timer in item vacuuming is a good thing to do, because there's not an additional mechanic that encourages people not to loot stuff. Just don't put time limits on things if you don't want to have everything drop at the end.

Similarly, the risk/reward issue is a lot of turning on delirium at all not going deep into it. It feels like it makes the game a lot harder at the get go for very little extra reward. You did all that and 5 rare items drop, that probably aren't getting picked up anyway.