My Interview with Jonathan Rogers at Pax West 2023

Video here: https://youtu.be/EGOE3YOpCoU

RPGIGAN
Hey, guys. RPGIGAN here and I'm here of course with Jonathan Rogers himself, cofounder of GGG. Thanks so much for taking the time to have a few words with me. We're all excited for POE2 coming in June, needless to say. One thing a lot of us are wondering is the end game; it's going to be a totally separate endgame, and we're just really wondering, will mechanics like Blight, Abyss, breach... are there plans to bring some of those over to the end game?



Rogers
There's definitely going to be a lot of those things returning. It really it just depends on whether, on how much I like those mechanics I guess. There are certain mechanics that over the years that I really love, others that I'm not so keen on and so probably try to rework as much as we can. But a lot of that's going to come during the closed beta. We're going to be taking a lot of those mechanics and putting them back in because when we launch, we probably don't have time to get all of those ones fully done. We have to redo all the effects and all stuff like that to make them look like they make sense in POE2. If we just put them straight in as they are right now, they would look a bit out of place. Modern graphics, basically. So yeah, we're going to take those and update them and do what we can. And making some modifications to the mechanics.



RPGIGAN
Yeah, the game is beautiful. I had a chance last night to come in and kind of explore. Very excited for it. I was wondering a little bit about crafting. I so often craft for profit, and I was wondering Essences in particular, they're a huge part of crafting so you can have that fixed affix. Are essences going to be in POE2?



Rogers
I am absolutely keen on essences. There may not be as many of them as there are in POE1. There is a huge number of them there. And one of the things that's sort of the philosophy of crafting is to try and make it so that...we've got a lot of crafting systems in POE1 now, like a ridiculous number. And so what we need to do is kind of like, I still want to have a lot of those things there, but we'll probably restrict some of them to certain domains. So what I mean by that, is let's say that one particular crafting system might be, like, good for a particular type of mods, or another crafting system might only be useful for weapons or things like that. So effectively, for each type of crafting system, if you want to craft the best weapon, there's like three or four crafting systems that you can do, and if you want to, craft boots here's like 3 or 4 different mods, but you know what I mean? That way it's kind of like you're not necessarily having the full complexity of like 25 crafting systems all applying to every single item to power craft.



RPGIGAN
No, that's great. So many newer players don't realize you start off with the fossils or essences, but then you can't [start out with bench] metacraft. So you're kind of customizing by item?



Rogers
So yeah, a lot of these things. The thing is, I really like all the crafting systems we've designed... at least most of them, so I'm very keen to retain as much of that as I can. And now that they're all augmented they're actually very easy to implement... POE2 started with POE1 as a base, so there's no problem at all to be able to do all that stuff easily. It's just a question of what we want to keep and what we don't want to keep.



RPGIGAN
Oh, great. I was wondering, just to change subjects a bit, on your favorite build yourself when you go back to the good old days and you just want to play the game, what are some builds you really like to pick up?



Rogers
Do you mean in POE2 or POE1?



RPGIGAN
POE1.



Rogers
You know, it's been a little while. Been a little while since I've been concentrating on POE2 for a while. I've always been a fan of kind of automation type stuff. So like more like Righteous Fire type build.



RPGIGAN
Ah, RF fan.



Rogers
There's a lot of players who sort of agree.



RPGIGAN
Oh definitely. I did a poll on my channel and the most popular build was Righteous Fire.



Rogers
(Laughs) Right okay, there's a reason. It's fun, right? So in Poe Two, we're obviously very keen to bring back those kinds of things, you know, we've got all the automation type features. Raging spirit and so on, it's all there. But at the same time, I hope some things that we feel like, righteous fire and so on, just completely running around.



RPGIGAN
Yeah, yeah. And one of my subscribers wanted to know about mines, totems and traps, are they all coming back in POE2?



Rogers
Absolutely. Absolutely. Although I'll tell you what, the way that mines and traps work is different now. So basically in POE2 we have a base type, which is for mine and trap builds. So effectively, rather than having them be spells, they're actually now attacks, and they have a base type which is the mine or the trap, which is a physical thing that you hold that acts as a damage source. And then depending on what base type you're using, any of those types of skills will act as a mine or a trap. So we have like, trap bases, and mine bases, and any of those skills can use one or the other. So the base type actually influences the way that you use the skill, which is a little bit different than it was before. Those bases mean that now you have to care about weapons when you're a trap or mine player, because we have the weapon swap and all that stuff, and you can now incorporate traps or mines in into a build that you can use that, but because you have weapon swap, even though you need that base type, you can still have a staff and go for weapon swap.



RPGIGAN
Oh interesting. Yeah, yeah. When it comes to trading, the trading system in POE, I love it. It's great because it's so free market and the market controls itself, with the price of divines and chaos and so on. The only thing that some people find sometimes frustrating is people that work all day, and then they come home at the end of the day and they only can get on for 3 hours. And they have a high profit item they crafted and they have to sell within that window. I was wondering if the trading system will be the same, or are there plans for a way to trade offline?



Rogers
Well, the problem is with offline trade is that it really causes a lot of issues with the economy. Generally, with trade, you can either have easy to search or automatic transactions. And if you have both of those at the same time the economy can spiral out of control very quickly.



RPGIGAN
One of my watchers was concerned about the bots.



Rogers
Yeah, exactly. So effectively, because we have easy searching through trade website you kind of can't do the automatic trade thing, so it's likely to stay the same. But that being said, there's definitely some nice improvements we can make to make things easier, but fundamentally you'll still have to physically be there to trade with someone else. If you don't have automatic trade, you really can't enforce that someone isn't somebody else. So it is actually quite a difficult problem. I guess the main thing that would help with that stuff is just kind of reputation style things. So basically you would need to make it so that someone's reputation is such that they are good enough to actually be able to sell stuff.



RPGIGAN
It's an interesting idea that they've talked about in Last Epoch.



Rogers
Right right.



RPGIGAN
Very cool. I had a few ideas of mine I wanted to throw your way. One is of course the Atlas system in POE1. I personally have always been a huge fan of Eater of Worlds and the Black Star. And so what do you think of an Atlas node that would swap out the Black Star with the infinite hunger so that they reverse? So the progression on one Eldritch Horror would go Black Star and then the Eater of Worlds, and the other would go Infinite hunger and then Searing Exarch.



Rogers
I'd have to talk to Mark about that. Cause he's the kind of person that would understand the full repercussions of something like that. I mean, it's a kind of funny thing that as we're continuing to do, okay as we want to expand into these kinds of random things to do more POE1 expansions.



RPGIGAN
And the way you keep the game fresh every three months is incredible. And then this whole new POE2 coming, it is going to be amazing. And of course I'm a big fan of brands. I always want more items where you can have an additional brand attached to an enemy. I always hope for that every league. (haha)



Rogers
I'll have to talk to Rishi about new uniques that are coming up, and maybe he can sneak one of those in there...



RPGIGAN
Sneak it in! Designed by supporter RPGIGAN! Jonathan Rogers, I won't waste any more of your time. Thank you so much sir. And thank you for taking the time. I love the game.



Rogers
No problem. Thank you very much.

ty

Thanks for this! Great interview~

His logic regarding trading is crap. The physical presence requirement is a source of constant aggravation for a lot of people especially with the ability to trade being solely dependent on whether or not the other person can even be bothered to respond. Trading in this game for anything other than high-ticket items is frequently a miserable experience.

"

Angrybagel wrote:

His logic regarding trading is crap. The physical presence requirement is a source of constant aggravation for a lot of people especially with the ability to trade being solely dependent on whether or not the other person can even be bothered to respond. Trading in this game for anything other than high-ticket items is frequently a miserable experience.

GGG employees should be made to go to 30 different coffee shops just to get 1.
Maybe 20 vendors if they buy coffee in bulk. Otherwise things are spinning out of control. I mean the economy and stuff...

This is irony right? But if - then I am so impressed of the writing, so because of that it feels real. I didn't read every line but ...

About trading in the game as a serious subject, I think nit's hard to just say one thing or another. It's enough that over 90 percent of all just think something without knowing why and what the outcome could be.

The biggest issue is divided in two, all bots - but also that it is really hard to make a working economy in a game. No one have ever succeeded, and the closest I have thought of that mayce could work (but probably not) is to have a limited amount of currency.

(As an example is the dumping from league to standard, even if that is not worse than just grind more in standard. But there are a lot of cons with a limited amount, so the economy is what it is. Glad Im not a trader.)

"

ATIX89 wrote:

This is irony right? But if - then I am so impressed of the writing, so because of that it feels real. I didn't read every line but ...

About trading in the game as a serious subject, I think nit's hard to just say one thing or another. It's enough that over 90 percent of all just think something without knowing why and what the outcome could be.

The biggest issue is divided in two, all bots - but also that it is really hard to make a working economy in a game. No one have ever succeeded, and the closest I have thought of that mayce could work (but probably not) is to have a limited amount of currency.

(As an example is the dumping from league to standard, even if that is not worse than just grind more in standard. But there are a lot of cons with a limited amount, so the economy is what it is. Glad Im not a trader.)

Video link is at the top.