Opinion: Give us a local test client (or something)

There needs to be some sort of free-build offline sandbox for the game at this point.

We do not have a stable 1.0, but this game is being treated as if it does. The frequent iteration the game is undergoing isn't forward-only, it's chaotic. It goes forward, backward, and side-to-side at random. GGG's intention is always forward, no doubt, but that's not what we always receive, because they don't entirely know what the final form of the base game is supposed to be yet. That's fine, that's early access, baby.

But usually, early access games don't require 50+ hours per patch to reach the part where you can actually test the game.

Requiring us to always play in-league makes build testing incredibly painful. Players have to grind through campaign, some distance into maps, and bet on the drops to be cooperative with their needs (to an extent that RNG never actually replicates) just to check if their build ideas work, and etc. And if they don't, they better hope they found enough useful loot/currency to pay for the next test.

We need some kind of test client. Ideally it would be local/offline so GGG doesn't have to support another live server. It could be kept insanely small. It doesn't need to have campaign or actual maps, just connect a single static "map" zone to it with a static mob pool. Then let players manually adjust the level and affixes on that zone, and they can run that to test with in various configs. Make the baseline as consistent as possible so that everyone is benchmarking against the same thing.

Just let players in the test client spawn/create gear, currency, and etc. directly so they can understand important things like unique gear interactions, viable minimums, possible crafting avenues, or ideal item chases for build guides or their own progression in the live patch. All drops in the test map instance could be disabled if players can spawn/edit this gear themselves.

I don't feel that something like this (offline, no market interaction, no live impact whatsoever, and very minimal 'content') would be any issue for GGG. It wouldn't subtract from the live League or game in any way, because it would not by itself be a gaming experience, just tooling. All it would do is potentially prevent someone from spending 20+ hours of grind just to see if a build idea is actually viable, and then quitting the League if they're defeated at the end of the 20+ hour test.

And yes, I know third party tooling exists for some of these concerns. POB for build theory, Craft of Exile for crafting testing, but these don't keep up 1:1 with the patching GGG does at all times (and they shouldn't). And just because good third party tooling can and does exist doesn't mean that GGG shouldn't provide their own tooling. They have the absolute best possible turnaround on making a valid test client for their patches, because they make the damn game.

Give people something to work with, because if we have to spend 15+ hours grinding campaign and 20+ hours on trade and mid maps just to see if we can hang in T10 maps with Ice Shards (or something else weird like that), we're all going to lose our minds. And if this tool makes life on Trade League less painful, just imagine how important it would be in SSF, to know you're working towards something actually decent, instead of hoping and praying.

I dunno, folks. I'm just tired, lol.

We will never get an offline client. Full stop. Not even a philosophy question, just how the game is designed. Exposing server code to end users enables hacking at unprecedented levels. They also have a lot of hidden values and secrets that they really like having in the game that wild be immediately exposed if users had server code. This just isn't a good suggestion for any love service game ever really. They have devs and interbank testers with tools like that already, the point of EA testing is real world testing not artificial testing.


I understand the 50+ hour feeling completely though. It's a huge reason I've come around to wanting a campaign alternative, because starting a new character always means a 16 hour campaign run before i really even start doing the thing I want to do.

Fair enough. I figure there's some way they could decouple all that and give us something close enough without an ounce of the server-related crap exposed, but who knows. I wasn't asking for a private server with the works, I was asking for a janky EXE that approximates sufficiently.

As for having these tools internally, that's great, but they can't get the volume of testing they would actually need internally. Obviously that's why they're in early access and inviting us to test it for them, but the flaw there is that if their internal testing produces a product the average player is unwilling to throw more than 30 hours at, they will never get any truly meaningful volume of testing on these things, and neither will the players themselves.

It is simply just too painful to test at scale. The vast majority of their interactables and rewards are locked behind large time scales (low drop rate items, grinding towards pinnacle bosses, etc.). They're beyond the horizon for the average player. So any incentive to endure the pain of testing is a what-if at best, in most cases.

Again, if the iteration from GGG was consistently forward motion, this wouldn't be an issue, but that's not the case. They have to do something to incentivize the player from minute 0 of your new character to make any of this worth it, because the incentive at the end is unreachable or doesn't exist. For me, part of that is knowing my own personal endgame, my build, is useful and achievable, but aside from stealing a known-good build from the internet, there is absolutely no way to prove that.

You might not even get the skill you actually want to try maining until you're level 40. You might legitimately never see a unique or lineage support that defines your build. If trade has them, you might never gain the Exalt/Div to buy it. It's a catch 22 of "the game needs to be fun enough to play" but "you have to play enough of the game to make it fun to play"