How We're Developing Our Next Expansion Differently

thats GOOD. At least this sounds good and im glad to hear good news from ggg first time for a long time. Good luck mr.devs, less features, more testing - nice stable league, here we go!

Good!

Make it simple and easy to understand, Chris. That's the secret. It will make our gameplay fun and your job easier.

Less is more!

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TehBoneKing wrote:

To poke at all the nerds who would complain about bugs in your content. i would just like to remind everyone that in the beginning game releases were 100% completely flawless. games like loz ocarina of time have ZERO bugs that could be exploited and every playthrough takes EXATLY as long as the developers intended. now that being said the crashes this league have been brutal, though they have gotten better, first impressions hurt.

As a dabbling speedrunner myself, (I can pull off most of the tricks, though my PBs are far, far from any WR) I've a counterpoint: there's a number of reasons why the definitive editions of games used for a lot of speedruns are the original 1.0 releases, often only in Japan. Besides the (often shorter) text sequences, a big thing in many of them is that... Most of those "exploits and bugs" only actually existed for a brief period before being patched, and never made it to the USA.

A good example would be the third Zelda game, "A Link to the Past." (one I'm much more familiar & versed with) The game has a huge list of potential exploits that were not discovered by the public until years after they were patched out by Nintendo. Highly popular tricks like Superspeed, Spindashing/Itemdashing, fake flippers, item-pushing (e.g, mirror deletion) and the like only ever exist in the original Japanese 1.0 release of the game; by the time the game came overseas, they'd been patched out, even though no player would realize they had existed at all for years.

Another example (on the N64) is arguably most iconic speedrunning glitch of them all, Super Mario 64's Backwards Long Jump. (BLJ) It didn't appear to get discovered by the public until around 1998 or 1999, when it was already patched out of the game by the "Shindou edition" of the game released in Japan in 1997. (for those wondering, it is this "Shindou Edition" that is the basis for the version of SM64 included with the recently-released "Super Mario 3D All-Stars" pack)

***

Even for those that bugs that weren't patched out, these are things that only showed up years later, as a result of speedrunners experimenting and trying to find exploits.

This is a huge contrast from game-breaking bugs that make the game unplayable for players who aren't even doing anything out of the ordinary. Your attempt to equate them to justify GGG's lax attitude towards testing is kinda laughable with how bad a "False equivalence" argument you have here. PoE's bugs aren't equivalent to "crazy, extreme exploits that required years to find (and were often initially thought to be impossible outside of TAS)" but more akin to just random softlocks.

Notice that those celebrated speedrunning games kinda lack random softlocks if you're playing the game as intended. Meanwhile in PoE, we all have experiences with bugs, crashes, etc. that have all stolen progress or prevented it. So anything to try to justify that is tantamount to gaslighting.

PogU nice looking forward to next leauge

Iam enjoying heist atm so keep it up poe thanks for the awesome game !

Awesome. Just awesome. Love the work you do, it's very, very appreciated!

I would rather have the next League focus on cleaning up and adding polish to the current content, rather than introduce yet another clunky league mechanic. You talk about feature creep making the game feel special, but all I'm noticing are a bunch of low-quality distractions. Improve what's already than rather than tacking on another gimmick.

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Mittsies wrote:

I would rather have the next League focus on cleaning up and adding polish to the current content, rather than introduce yet another clunky league mechanic. You talk about feature creep making the game feel special, but all I'm noticing are a bunch of low-quality distractions. Improve what's already than rather than tacking on another gimmick.

+1

fix as much as u can and add QoL ! That's my kind of league

My immediate feeling upon first reading this announcement was "well it's all very positive I guess, so why am I feeling underwhelmed??"

The “experiment” in summary:

"

… defined a very specific scope
… make sure that no work creeps in that isn't in the planned scope.
… have everything quite playable and ready for gameplay iteration before our marketing deadline, and in a very stable and polished state by the time it is released.

"Side effects" in summary:

"

… patch notes are much, much shorter than they usually are.
… focusing on getting the most important changes done, and doing them well.
… the balance changes we are doing have been carefully chosen to have the largest impact and fix real problems.
… likely that we'll front-load the announcement to have more of the expansion's contents revealed at once, reducing the number of small teasers we post in the weeks following announcement.

So the experiment is about introducing a few well-established, basic (viz. no brainer) hygiene practices that should always be in place to avoid development constantly being out of control. The fact that these are being introduced as part of an experiment says an awful lot about why past leagues have been in the state they were on release.

And what proportion of the PoE community would have any serious objections to the side effects? Can't see the masses rioting over shorter patch notes, prioritisation of changes to focus on "the largest impact to fix real problems" and substantially less drip-feeding of information.

There's a tone of feeling bruised in the announcement which is understandable, but equally, many in the community have probably felt thoroughly let down in recent weeks.

Will continue to have faith and support Chris and the team at GGG. Thanks for the communication. Really hope things are turned around for the better, for December and many more leagues to come.

.

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Sinaranu wrote:

My immediate feeling upon first reading this announcement was "well it's all very positive I guess, so why am I feeling underwhelmed??"

Well, as you noticed... A lot of it was an underwhelming announcement. There was very little of substance to be had in there, much of it missing some of the core issues the game & its current development paradigm have. I went into a LOT more detail on it a page back over here.

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Sinaranu wrote:

The fact that these are being introduced as part of an experiment says an awful lot about why past leagues have been in the state they were on release.

I think this is the core meat of everything you've been saying. I've noticed for a few years now that GGG's management of their development has... Not actually done well in keeping with the best practices that are kinda universal through the software industry. (gaming or otherwise)

I found solid evidence, for instance, that at least through 2017, GGG lacked any clear, thorough reference documentation on the game, (even as functional as the extant wiki) and it's not clear if that situation has improved in the years since.

GGG has managed to curate a surprisingly capable and robust team of creative & programming talent, even without considering that they're on a tiny isolated island nation of only 5 million people... But it's been an open question whether the management over that talent has been able to properly realize their capacity.

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Sinaranu wrote:

And what proportion of the PoE community would have any serious objections to the side effects?

To be honest, it comes across as a form of weasel-wording on Chris's part. By effectively "apologizing in advance," it implies that there are some that would disagree, and thus legitimizes the subject being open to debate, rather than a no-brainer... And thus mitigates (if not outright absolves) any guilt that the decision-makers had for failures to match the best practices.