Path of Exile

Some thoughts from Chris

Hey Reddit,

We've read heaps of feedback on Reddit over the last week, and wanted to address some of the topics that have come up a lot.

There has been speculation that I have personally been driving the balance changes to match my original vision for Path of Exile. There is a little truth to this, in that I want to restore areas of the game that were important but have been eroded, but almost every area of specific balance work is the product of a large team of designers working together for a long time to come up with solutions to problems we want to address.

We care more about making a good game than we do about vanity metrics like player concurrency records. I suspect this is because we're gamers first and businesspeople second. The direction Path of Exile was going in over the last year was breaking player records but wasn't really leaving us happy with our own game.

For more than a year we've been accumulating changes that we were worried about releasing because they would affect the way people currently play Path of Exile. We understand that our game is an escape for some players and if that is potentially disrupted, it could be very upsetting for them. We have great appreciation for the fact that Path of Exile has become part of your lives. When someone comes into my office with a prospective nerf, more than half the time I suggest we don't do it because it would hurt a build without a sufficiently good reason. We try to be very cautious and to care about your experience with Path of Exile.

Unfortunately, we've been hitting a breaking point with power creep recently and really need to address it. Meanwhile, much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in. It honestly feels to us that this is in part because we've moved further away from our own vision over time.

So, you're unhappy and we're unhappy and that means it's really time that we start to correct things. The changes we are making in Expedition are a carefully-considered set that sound daunting but probably have less overall impact on the way you will play the game than you suspect they may. These changes really open up possibilities for the future and put us in a good position for working towards the release of Path of Exile 2.

When I'm writing to the community, I usually try to avoid saying what is fun and what isn't (as it's quite subjective), but we are very confident that the new Path of Exile is going to be more fun. There's a wealth of powerful new builds out there to discover and we honestly can't wait to see what you come up with.

I'd like to talk about some specific topics that have come up on reddit in the last week:

What is your motivation behind increasing the mana cost of so many support gems? Why wasn't this mentioned in the game balance manifesto?

During the gamewide balance assessment we did for 3.15, we identified many support gems that just cost too little mana and needed to be adjusted up to the fair baseline for their effects.

We mentioned this in the manifesto as:

"We have also taken this opportunity to make mana multipliers on support gems more consistent. In general, mana multipliers have gone up slightly, but several gems have had mana multipliers lowered as a result of this pass."

At the time of writing, we hadn't worked out final values for these gems and hence the manifesto section was written vaguely and inadvertently downplayed the extent of the changes. I'm sorry about this and we'll try to be clearer in the future. This is especially disappointing because our main intent with the manifesto was to make sure that it had detailed and transparent explanations for most of our big changes.

Why did you remove the Cold Damage Over Time stat from Hypothermia?

We're going to be re-adding cold damage over time to Hypothermia, granting 29% more at gem level 20.

Hypothermia was never intended to be a cold DoT support gem. It just had the cold damage over time stat added because cold DoT builds needed more support gems at the time. As there are now more alternatives and the support gem was effectively two different supports combined into one, we decided to remove it.

A lot of players have found the removal confusing or jarring and we don't really have any balance concerns with it being there, so we've decided to add it back for now. We will remove it from Hypothermia again when we create another cold DoT-focused support gem in future.

Do you really believe that Ultimatum had poor player retention because it was too rewarding?

I was interviewed by Jason at VentureBeat and we chatted about the Ultimatum league. The take-away line that is quoted from this interview is that I felt that Ultimatum had bad retention because it was too rewarding, and people are quick to point out that this was not the problem with Ultimatum.

I agree.

The quote from the interview is as follows:

"Retention during the league was poor. I would say it was in the bottom 40% of leagues, a bit below average. And this is partly because for the league, both its combat was a bit spammy and its item rewards were a bit spammy," said Wilson. "These are two things we hadn’t determined during playtesting that became apparent over the course of the league. And so the fact that it was quite heavy with its reward systems meant that players played it for less time than they normally would, and this was quite useful to learn from." <...> "So overall player numbers dipped a little more than they would have done by the third month, which is disappointing, but it’s a consequence of the way that Ultimatum was designed."

To put my thoughts into a considered, written reply (rather than an off-the-cuff answer to an unexpected question in an interview primarily about Expedition): There were two big problems with the Ultimatum league from my point of view:

  • The encounters themselves didn't have great combat. They achieved challenge by just spamming a whole lot of rare monsters at you and it was hard to follow what was going on.
  • While the core Ultimatum double-or-nothing item reward system was decent, the absolutely massive spam of items that occurred after these encounters was unnecessary and only contributes to the problems that Path of Exile has with items currently.

I absolutely agree that the first of these points (spammy encounters), alongside other meta issues (stale metagame, etc.) contributed far more to poor retention than the heavy rewards did. The rewards issue is more of a long-term problem and I should not have implied that it was related to the immediate performance of the league.

In this clip, you mentioned that you weren't going to make sudden, extreme changes to the game – are these changes in line with that statement?

The balance changes we're making to Path of Exile in 3.15 are not the type of drastic changes that I was referring to in that clip from 2019. The changes they made to that Marvel Heroes game were ten times as impactful as what we are doing here. We are not fundamentally changing how Path of Exile is played to anywhere near such to a significant degree. We are not looking at one-minute map runs and saying that they should now take ten minutes. Yes, the balance changes do have an impact on the design of many builds, but those builds will still be capable and appropriately powerful afterwards. I know the changes are daunting to look at before you're able to experience them in game, but there are so many more opportunities for viable builds now, and we're expecting it to be a lot more engaging to play.

By the way, I stand by exactly what I said in that 2019 interview. We often discuss making larger changes to the game and we cite the points mentioned in that clip as the reason to be careful, to not change too much at once, and to seek community feedback on the changes. We have been carefully following your feedback and will continue to do so once you've had a chance to play and let us know how it has affected your builds in practise.

Why didn't you nerf aurabots? Is this favouritism from developers?

We don't have a specific plan that we are ready to commit to yet. We like how auras individually work, and feel that stacking a bunch of auras on your own character also has appropriate costs. We know that dedicated aura support characters are very powerful but we don't have a specific plan ready for 3.15 to address this, so it hasn't been included in the patch. We have given all of our balance changes a lot of thought and testing, and want to apply the same standards to a potential aura change.

Some players speculate that because Mark (Neon) played this build in the past, he is protecting it from nerfs. A plan wasn't brought to him for approval in 3.15 and we had a lot of nerfs already so we didn't go out of our way to rush one in.

Do you make game balance decisions based on incorrect data from the community wiki?

There was a 4000-upvote thread about how we balance skills by looking at incorrect data on the wiki and making decisions based on those numbers.

We don't use the wiki for doing balance work. The numbers that we tweak in our internal tools are an entirely different form than the final values you see in the game or on the wiki. What happened in this case was a mistake while preparing the patch notes. The person preparing the patch notes often copy/pastes the formatting for skill stat descriptions from the wiki and then adjusts the values to the correct ones based on the skill's balance history. Unfortunately with over a thousand distinct patch notes to write, many of which only getting final values in the last few days, mistakes were made and a few values were left unmodified and incorrect.

This led to a misleading patch note and a lot of confusion. This was a mistake and it shouldn't have happened. But I can assure you we aren't balancing based on wiki data when we have it in a significantly different form in our internal tools.

With over a hundred developers and thousands of changes going into each expansion, communicating everything clearly is a challenge. We will continue to improve this process and welcome any feedback about how we can make changes to Path of Exile in a way that is better understood and less upsetting to players. If you have feedback about what you would have preferred us to have done differently during our pre-launch period this time, please share it with us. In the meantime, I'm going to get back to playtesting Expedition. See you on Friday!


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