Just watched the interviews about balancing. That explains a lot.

Apparently only about 2 people can make unchecked balance decisions and about 5 can do it with supervision. And all of them are working on POE1 until the POE1 league is ready to be rolled out.

Alright. That explains it.

Here is some constructive criticism, if you don't want to hire more people:

Simplify the balancing process. Make any buff either +5% or -5%. Do not make wild assumptions about consequences, that will fail by complexity.

Just make your 5% buffs and read the rest out of user statistics. Buff defenses of the builds that die the most. Buff damage of the builds that need the most time per map.

Made a mistake? No drama, players can survive a 5% nerf for one month.

I was outright flabbergasted when he said that... it clears things up why the game has been non functional (aside from LS and two other builds that are boring as hell). Still doesn't seem very smart to run the development like this.

Wait I missed that. That process sounds micromanaged as hell. Like to the point you'll never balance the game. There are way too many skills and abilities to balance for 2 people to be able to oversee them all.

And considering PoE2 have the worst balance changes i ever experienced in any game ever, those 2 doesn´t know what they are doing.

Not only do they overcorrect and make builds go from op to completely useless, they also do blanket nerfs that fix 1problem and create 10new problems. They destroy more builds then they fix almost every patch, they are completely clueless......


One example would be "cast on effects" shortly after the EA was released, some builds could abuse them and either looping or making them trigger many times per second, making them very op.

But that was just a small percentage of the builds under very specific conditions. Most builds did not trigger them so frequently it was op.

An extremely easy fix for this would be putting a timer on how often they can trigger, this would only effect the op builds and all other builds would be uneffected. It´s such a simple and straight forward to see nerf, to not do this is like a mathematician not understanding how to calculate 1+1=2........

But what do they do???? yeah they make the energy required to trigger them so insanely high about 99% of the builds using "cast on effects" became so useless they where unplayable...........

It´s a complete joke. [Removed by Support]

You cannot just hire out of a sudden someone. Even if you pick someone with vast experience in game design they still need to understand the codebase, share the "vision" of the game (not talking about Jonathan here, just the vision of the game -> what makes PoE... PoE).

Onboarding takes time, can be even several months, legacy code involved which makes things even harder.

So you end up with needing even more time before the new developer/s start picking up the same speed as the "old" team. Not to say just because a team is bigger it doesn't mean certainly that they will deliver faster and that due to the reasons above and some others.

Outside of NZ you are talking about either remote work (which I don't think is present, iirc, GGG is office based), or Visa which again is quite tremendous to get after the pandemic.

Imagine, if only 2 person are allowed to do this because it's too complex, but somehow, when 0.2 came out, they absolutely bricked the minion builds.

It was so bad, even the lead devs admitted it was a blatant mess.

They unbricked it a week later but it's still extremely underwhelming in comparison to other classes for end game.

I just did my first T0 Sims with my SSF char this season and I died 5 times. At least I was able to complete it but this is absurd...

"

DankWeebTrash#7386 เขียน:

Wait I missed that. That process sounds micromanaged as hell. Like to the point you'll never balance the game. There are way too many skills and abilities to balance for 2 people to be able to oversee them all.

Watch streamers/youtube. Nerf/buff if they see something. Seems easy.

"

enslavedemperor#5410 เขียน:

You cannot just hire out of a sudden someone. Even if you pick someone with vast experience in game design they still need to understand the codebase, share the "vision" of the game (not talking about Jonathan here, just the vision of the game -> what makes PoE... PoE).

Onboarding takes time, can be even several months, legacy code involved which makes things even harder.

So you end up with needing even more time before the new developer/s start picking up the same speed as the "old" team. Not to say just because a team is bigger it doesn't mean certainly that they will deliver faster and that due to the reasons above and some others.

Outside of NZ you are talking about either remote work (which I don't think is present, iirc, GGG is office based), or Visa which again is quite tremendous to get after the pandemic.

They had 6 years to add enough people. They didn't. I have no sympathy for them.

+1 👍

"

DankWeebTrash#7386 เขียน:

Wait I missed that. That process sounds micromanaged as hell. Like to the point you'll never balance the game. There are way too many skills and abilities to balance for 2 people to be able to oversee them all.

You didn't miss anything, the OP just failed to understand what was said (or is purposefully not understanding).

They said there are 2 people that can make balance changes UNCHECKED. Meaning they understand the inner workings of the game enough that they are trusted to make changes without additional review. These are the two people that can make emergency changes to balance, no one else can push a balance change without review.

The others that work on balance go through a standard change control process to ensure their balance changes will have the intended effect.

Completely normal development (or even IT overall) setup. A single digit number of people, whom through LOCAL experience and overall skills, are trusted enough to make significant changes without going through the normal controls. In many, larger, organizations there are zero people allowed to do that.