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whydirt
Apr 18, 2001


Gaz Posting Brigade :c00lbert:
My interest in this tanked after how they treated Elentor :(

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Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

whydirt posted:

My interest in this tanked after how they treated Elentor :(

big same

Rakeris
Jul 20, 2014


Not empty quoting

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





whydirt posted:

My interest in this tanked after how they treated Elentor :(

I missed something obviously, is whatever happened in this thread?

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
Who's Elentor and how did they treat them? Sorry, I haven't been following this.

Papercut
Aug 24, 2005
Elentor is a kick rear end technical artist who was doing amazing things for the game performance and they fired her because she couldn't make one scrum for medical reasons.

Elentor
Dec 14, 2004

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
I gave the game a 30% FPS improvement in the first week. I joined under the condition that I'd have a certain freedom to work as a Technical Artist, which is notorious for having long tasks (6 months+) without the scrutiny of agile or scrum. I managed to unify most departments into a cohesive unit to work towards increasing performance in unison and gave several presentations on good praxis to improve game performance, and religiously took players' concerns, even from this very forum and other communities, as hints to analyze some of the worst performant zones of the game.

During my stay I created a culture of benchmarking and analyzing the performance of the game throughout patches, including adding a novel method to record performance degradation through the record of heatmaps of each zone of the game. One of them was featured here.



Notoriously one of the zones had at some point twice as much FPS as when I joined. Once my work there was done, I shifted my work to 0.9's Asset Store and MTX release because they needed special technology. During that time I had multiple meetings with artists, presentations, lectures and reviews of concept arts on my weekends, all while trying to promote a better, more organized pipeline because the MTX team was sort of made of people from assorted teams.

During that time there was a shift in that Technical Artists (me) had now to subscribe to agile and scrum methods. I spent 3 weeks fruitlessly on what was agreed to be a six months task. Irregardless afterwards due to the freedom that I had been previously given to pursue my own projects, I focused on the MTX and Asset Store aspect of 0.9, because I deemed the remaining TA tasks for 0.9 not meaningful and also things I could do before December (the original deadline for 0.9, not March). I did clear up a few things before that:
1) That I'd have autonomy over my tasks, as a TA, from the moment I joined the company
2) That I'd have some middle managerial power acknowledged since I was effectively bridging different sectors
3) That I did not work well with agile, something I stated in the recruitment stage.

Despite me being available on weekends, my positive relationship with the artists, QA members, level designers, my availability to assist anyone who asked me anything in real time any day of the week, I was fired a few days after telling my direct boss that I planned to change departments - something I was told was very much a possibility and the company was flexible. The goal was so that I would no longer have what they called "invisible working", which was working not listed in task managers, like all the times I had meetings and personally set the budgets for the project, or the texel density budget for third party contractors, or helped coordinate and found the performance effort with 27 tasks to improve the game's FPS, or how I was already in plans with the level designer for further FPS improvements in 1.0.

I was fired for not fulfilling the scrum tasks and not being a good fit for the company. No severance pay, no month warning, no anything. I had just told them that I had finally finished paying off my medical debt and this was my first month where I could make money for myself and to take care of my gf, and then I was fired, penniless, and with no idea how I'm gonna pay rent.

The last thing I said to anyone before I got the news that I was fired was that I was having trouble keeping up with the scrum/agile which I was told upon hiring would not be enforced upon me, doing to my medical issues related to cancer. I said that as long as I'm allowed to work on my own I would get everything needed for 0.9 before December, which I would, just not in bites where I could give reports every 2 weeks on tasks that can take months for any meaningful development. The next news I got is that I was out, I had lost my access to mostly everything, and that it "should come as no surprise".

Both the supporter pack themes, armor set, concept designs and descriptions for 0.9 and 1.0's asset store were written, designed and planned by me and agreed upon a mix of the finances and marketing team. I reviewed every MTX piece planned, had meetings to discuss their viability and technical merits, and all of that was discarded as invisible work because I did not write a few documents in my github task list that no one was going to use in the upcoming future while spur-of-the-moment decisions were made that required my utmost attention on the monetization schemes of the game, including being part of conversations in an attempt to keep them as ethical as possible while profitable.

Elentor fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Nov 30, 2022

Grey Face
Mar 31, 2017

whydirt posted:

My interest in this tanked after how they treated Elentor :(

yeah same

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.






That's a load of poo poo, and I'm sorry to find out it happened to you.

Speaking as a QA guy, scrum/agile doesn't work for everything, and the people who think that every single thing in software development should fit into the same agile framework are stupid and can lick my balls.

Best of luck to you moving forward, I hope you find something better, and soon.

Sadly I'm in the financial industry, which doesn't have a lot of demand for technical artists.

LeninVS
Nov 8, 2011

whydirt posted:

My interest in this tanked after how they treated Elentor :(

Uninstalled the day I heard. Too bad they got some of my money already. At least I can whale out on something else now

xZAOx
Sep 6, 2004
PORKCHOP SANDWICHES
I adhere to there always being three sides to any story (mine, yours, then the actual truth in the middle), so I'm not going to form a full opinion with only one side. Just something age has taught me.

That said, the lack of any severance is super lovely. I'm a software developer, and while in America it's not guaranteed, even smaller places usually give you a couple of weeks.

If they told you "you should see this coming" or whatever, it sounds like those talks with your boss, you each interpreted in very different ways. I've had situations too where during the interview very explicit arrangements were laid out, and two months later after I was out for a week due to a miscarriage at five months along, I come back and I'm told "we can't justify this upcoming vacation". At which point I told them I wasn't asking them to, because it was happening. I tried to stay positive about the place but after our trauma and feeling backstabbed, I ended up quitting a couple of weeks later.

All that to say - sounds like they lost a great talent. Sometimes a business needs to work one way, and not everyone likes that, and it's okay and people part ways. But they should have had some polite but frank conversations first to see if something better could be arranged. And if not, given you some severance. Given what you said about the interview, it sounds like there was some management and/or leadership shake up or something?

I'm a big fan of agile, and I've worked with devs before that claimed some project or effort couldn't be done in an iterative manner, and I was able to show them that yes, it could, and it ends up a better workflow too, once you adjust your thinking. However, I don't know poo poo about technical artists or how their work is done.

Tallgeese
May 11, 2008

MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR


This is why you gotta get all this kind of stuff in writing. Verbal agreements from management types are not worth the breath they were uttered with.

Cancer too. Absurd.

Elentor
Dec 14, 2004

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

xZAOx posted:

I'm a big fan of agile, and I've worked with devs before that claimed some project or effort couldn't be done in an iterative manner, and I was able to show them that yes, it could, and it ends up a better workflow too, once you adjust your thinking. However, I don't know poo poo about technical artists or how their work is done.

I understand that I was not a good fit for agile, but I was nevertheless working and my final statement was that I wanted to change dept. so, as was recommended to me by HR, so that my work wouldn't be "Invisible work". When I was recruited, however, I explicitly had this talk about agile, and how my biggest frustration in my previous job was under similar circumstances (again, a task agreed upon to be a six months long task resulting in a frustrated boss after 2 months). Some TechArt things are 30 minutes bug fixes that I was doing on sundays whenever an artist requested of me, but "rewrite an entire physics engine because there's no public alternative in the market" is a many months long endeavor. It's common for Techart tasks to last between 3 months to 2 years or more. Activision quarantines their Techarts into their own R&D laboratory so that they can spend however long it takes into their new technology.

A good reference is EVE Online's procedural planet generator, which took 3 devs 3 months to make. I've also written a planet generator for a game in 3 months. That's a task that has history both external and personal that will take 3 months. If I don't show something in 2 months it's not because I haven't done anything, it's because the 2000 lines of code are in some limbo where they don't compile due to complexity. But I've written two planet generators, one iteratively and posted the process in this very forum along with code, and one for a shipped product, so I guarantee that by month 3 there'll be something of proven quality.

Ultimately their side is probably that I was not easy to handle as someone for a team that decided to scrum everything, and there was a paradigm shift towards scrum and agile for everyone, despite my initial concerns about it. All that I wanted was the freedom to do stuff at my own time, deliver before the patches, and just have peace of mind to work on my own solutions. QA and Level Design worked very close with me, and the 3D Lead often came to me to ask questions because of my expertise. I had a good relation with the team despite keeping to myself with my projects and a very clear timetable of what I intended to do for 0.9 and 1.0.

I miss working in the project and my coworkers and most of them were as confused as I am. I wasn't concerned with invisible working because I was everywhere talking to everyone all the time, but none of that counted in the github task lists, and once the paradigm shift changed to that it was clear that my initial freedom to work the way I was used to was stressing my high ups who had to justify what I was doing quantitively.

I don't think that's something that can be done for TechArts, especially ones filling the role of Technical Directors, and a lot of my job was middle management, something that I was granted power early on to exercise in order to help coordinate the groups. The other part of my job was staring at math equations for weeks, which doesn't yield for anything meaningful in sprint meetings.

I also explained that because of my cancer-related issues I had periods of intense pain so I often worked coding on paper before being able to sit down and pass the code to the computer. This was known from the first week I joined - the CEO even thought it was true dedication to code on paper just to do work under strained conditions. This has never prevented me from doing my job before, being the first person to implement NVIDIA's Fluidworks on Unity, having a DX11 code fix in every DX11 game ever, or writing an L-Tree algorithm that Activision tried to buy. What that means is that while I can and will get my job done before a patch deadline, my sprint might be 10 papers of mathematical equations done on bed before I pass them to the computer.

Right now I finished paying my medical debt but I have no money to pay for the taxes for the money I made to pay my debts (lol) and 2 months worth of rent. Ironically even one month of severance pay would have given me at least a year of rent to help myself settle in, but as it is I'm stranded.

Elentor fucked around with this message at 07:55 on Nov 30, 2022

Elentor
Dec 14, 2004

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
But for what is worth, most of the LE team is full of dedicated, well meaning people who are by far the least toxic devs I've ever worked with, my immediate superior notwithstanding. I appreciate the sympathies but I don't want anyone to boycott the game because of me. The team is hard working, and probably the only company where I neither faced nor saw any instance of sexism and even in the event where a non-binary person was misgendered by mistake, the entire team made the case of adding pronouns to their names in solidarity to make it part of the company culture not to repeat that.

I'm not saying this because of some NDA or some clause telling me not to trash on the company or whatever. I have pretty much nothing to lose. I did however like working on the game, I miss working on the game, and I wish things had gone differently.

Elentor fucked around with this message at 08:07 on Nov 30, 2022

xZAOx
Sep 6, 2004
PORKCHOP SANDWICHES
That really sucks. Thanks for the info too about your role - I genuinely enjoy and appreciate hearing how other walks of life / careers go. Helps expand my worldview.

I'm surprised they wanted something so...concrete to show. I've done things that were more R&D or heavy refactoring, (or as we call it, "taking a chainsaw to the codebase") where stuff isn't really deliverable in the typical cadence. I still always have updates to give, though. When I sit down to work, ultimately there is some goal I'm trying to accomplish, in the short term, that can be a "deliverable". Sometimes a "spike (aka, research)" story outcomes are "write up real stories after figuring out some basic stuff". Or it might be "get this one page/module working on the new stack", even if the rest of the app is broken still. Or if it's a new project, it's little baby steps along the way (login page, then dashboard, then profile page, or whatever). We do weekly demos at my current place, and sometimes we just give updates on bigger initiatives, when we don't have stuff to really demo for it.

Like the planet generator stuff...I can definitely see how that's potentially iterative and would fit. Not everyone likes working as collaboratively and iteratively as you can with agile though, and to each their own. It sounds like you really like doing your own thing and managing yourself, and holding yourself accountable for deliverables. Some places that probably works great, and it sounds like at first it did there. Times change though, I guess. Sucks that it was so shortly after the interview especially. I'm still shocked that they gave you no severance. If you had been talking to HR, it sounds like maybe you did know that there was some friction that was causing issues?

TaintedBalance
Dec 21, 2006

hope, n: desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfilment

xZAOx posted:

That really sucks. Thanks for the info too about your role - I genuinely enjoy and appreciate hearing how other walks of life / careers go. Helps expand my worldview.

I'm surprised they wanted something so...concrete to show. I've done things that were more R&D or heavy refactoring, (or as we call it, "taking a chainsaw to the codebase") where stuff isn't really deliverable in the typical cadence. I still always have updates to give, though. When I sit down to work, ultimately there is some goal I'm trying to accomplish, in the short term, that can be a "deliverable". Sometimes a "spike (aka, research)" story outcomes are "write up real stories after figuring out some basic stuff". Or it might be "get this one page/module working on the new stack", even if the rest of the app is broken still. Or if it's a new project, it's little baby steps along the way (login page, then dashboard, then profile page, or whatever). We do weekly demos at my current place, and sometimes we just give updates on bigger initiatives, when we don't have stuff to really demo for it.

Like the planet generator stuff...I can definitely see how that's potentially iterative and would fit. Not everyone likes working as collaboratively and iteratively as you can with agile though, and to each their own. It sounds like you really like doing your own thing and managing yourself, and holding yourself accountable for deliverables. Some places that probably works great, and it sounds like at first it did there. Times change though, I guess. Sucks that it was so shortly after the interview especially. I'm still shocked that they gave you no severance. If you had been talking to HR, it sounds like maybe you did know that there was some friction that was causing issues?

As someone who has worked their way up the exec level in video game development, I have easily run into more middle managers who are absolute nightmares to work with based on refusing to be flexible with their underlings because of some combination of malincentives (they get graded, promoted, and bonuses based on fitting people into boxes that they can grade, promote, and distribute bonuses on) and lovely controlling behavior, that is often passed on from other managers.

And, given the specifics of game dev background, Elentor is correct that Techart is kind of its own weird thing. They touch a lot of different aspects of your system, can uncover all kinds of nightmare blockers and things that would be highly disruptive to a sprint/scoring planning flow, and are better aimed at specific tasks and working with at the roadmap level, not the sprint level. Having them as part of standup is fine, but having them move around or having assigned a bunch of specific JIRA tickets for their specific tasks and objectives just does not compart with what other people on the team are doing.

Also, just because you can see friction exists or an oncoming problem is there, doesn't mean that your prepared for how bad it could be. I got PIPed once because my manager just had no idea how to actually contain or facilitate the work I was doing, despite the fact that multiple products and departments were jockeying for my time because I was doing my role as a force multiplier outside the bounds my manager understood. The PIP was cancelled a little after a week when my super boss came down to figure out why a bunch of people were coming to him asking why I had been told I could no longer support them and had to just focus on a single failing product that wasn't going to get better. Fortunately I actually had a positive relationship with my super boss, so that was fairly easy to manage, but the only reason I got the PIP was because the company was large enough that they did that as a matter of course to CYA. My actual boss would have fired me on the spot, which was demonstrated by the PIP not actually being achievable.

Your posts are coming off real victim blame-y as an FYI. Stop defending some abstract manager in the face of an actual worker putting forward their story.

Megaman's Jockstrap
Jul 16, 2000

What a horrible thread to have a post.
Yeah any further interest in this game has cratered. I would try to get the "gaming press" to pick up this story, they're always looking for a scandal and this company's management deserves to be punished.

Deki
May 12, 2008

It's Hammer Time!
I'll still probably play the release version just because I already paid for it, but I'm gonna hard pass on mtx.

Tiny Timbs
Sep 6, 2008

tbh I've been holding off on playing the game because it runs like absolute rear end on my 2022 gaming laptop with a 3060-equivalent so it doesn't seem too promising that they fired the person who was working across teams to fix that problem

xZAOx
Sep 6, 2004
PORKCHOP SANDWICHES

Thanks for the perspective, I appreciate it. Your PIP story sounds similar to Elentor's story, just with a much better ending.

TaintedBalance posted:

Your posts are coming off real victim blame-y as an FYI. Stop defending some abstract manager in the face of an actual worker putting forward their story.

Sorry if that's how it's coming across. Was just trying to understand what was happening, as opposed to jumping on a mob bandwagon. Elentor's awesome so I immediately understand why people immediately want to take their side. Elentor is the only person we can talk to about it, so of course my questions all go to them, and it can look like the person getting questioned is being attacked. I'm not defending anyone, or at least not intentionally. Just asking if certain scenarios are the bigger picture that was or could have been going on. When there's fights I tend to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and try to understand all sides.

Anywhos, I'll move on, and I appreciate the discussion.

Edilaic
Jul 10, 2008
Yeah, I know this kind of thing can happen in Engineering too, I definitely experienced it in both game dev and other fields. There are some times when you get a terrible performance review while helping like, the entire studio, because your "personal impact" is lacking. (I managed to get an employee of the quarter award while also getting rated "Unsatisfactory", which was definitely hilarious in hindsight, though not at the time.) It really underscores the importance of having a good manager that understands what you're doing.

Luckily for me, I've managed to find a studio and a manager that understands the greater effects of this force multiplying, so I can say that they are out there. (Adapting the sprint cadence and reporting to my working style is a bit silly though, I end up with just a ticket that's "Edilaic's work for sprint X" with a time bucket of half the sprint, and just record notes of what I do in there.)

MrMidnight
Aug 3, 2006

Look at all those open positions. Wonder why.

https://lastepoch.com/careers

interrodactyl
Nov 8, 2011

you have no dignity
I already lost interest in this game after Elentor's experience, but just saw this and lol what?

https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/item-gifting-development-update-from-our-principal-game-designer/51175

tldr:

- No trading at all.
- You can gift items to players...only in your party...only if they are playing at the same time as you (e: and only if it drops in the zome you're playing in)

Why did they even bother making multiplayer? Who is going to keep playing this and buying MTX?

For the vast majority of people, this is now just a single player game with global chat, which is fine if that's the direction they want to go in, but they've been talking about trading and economy as a feature since at least 2018.

interrodactyl fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Dec 18, 2022

Toshimo
Aug 23, 2012

He's outta line...

But he's right!
That's basically the D3 method. D3: Notably bad multiplayer game.

John Lee
Mar 2, 2013

A time traveling adventure everyone can enjoy

interrodactyl posted:

Why did they even bother making multiplayer? Who is going to keep playing this. . .

For the vast majority of people, this is now just a single player game with global chat

Like, this sounds dubious, but if true: what is so brokebrained about the ARPG community that item trading is by a large margin the important part of multiplayer? Like, sure, some people love the economy side of things, Path of Exile exists for this reason, but I would have thought that the important part of playing with friends, and certainly the part I was interested in, was actually playing with them.

interrodactyl
Nov 8, 2011

you have no dignity

John Lee posted:

Like, this sounds dubious, but if true: what is so brokebrained about the ARPG community that item trading is by a large margin the important part of multiplayer? Like, sure, some people love the economy side of things, Path of Exile exists for this reason, but I would have thought that the important part of playing with friends, and certainly the part I was interested in, was actually playing with them.

If I find a good item for my friend but our schedules were off by 10 minutes, I can't give them the item. The reverse is also true.

I think this would have been received much better if they didn't talk about how item trading was super important to the end vision of the game for the last 4 years.

e: On reflection I can see how my response may have been hyperbolic, but regardless of my feelings on it I'd be curious to see if this changes other people's likelihood to play the game in the way they originally wanted to.

interrodactyl fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Dec 18, 2022

John Lee
Mar 2, 2013

A time traveling adventure everyone can enjoy

interrodactyl posted:

If I find a good item for my friend but our schedules were off by 10 minutes, I can't give them the item. The reverse is also true.

I think this would have been received much better if they didn't talk about how item trading was super important to the end vision of the game for the last 4 years.

I get that you can't give items to people, it's just "drat, so multiplayer is entirely pointless now if you can't put items up for sale in a marketplace, 80% of the audience now does not want to play with people" sounds like a pretty dramatic claim, and like I said I would have thought that fighting monsters and chatting and whatnot was the main draw of multiplayer. I also think you're overstating the degree to which they said item trading was important? Like, I'm sure they DID say it was important, because I've been reading their updates since the middle of 2021 and they basically say EVERYTHING'S important, but I definitely never got the idea that it was in any way a specific focus - they were like "there's going to be a bazaar," and now they're like "We were dedicated to having a bazaar, but with some kind of system that didn't wildly invalidate the drops you received on your own
but it turns out that's impossible because of Economy, so it's not gonna be in, sorry"

edit re: your edit: Yeah, fair enough, and I think it definitely will harm the market - there's review tanking going down on Steam, where a bunch of people are disappointed at the lack of a marketplace, and are also taking the time to air grievances, I'm seeing a lot of 'dead game, will never be finished, no significant updates for a while' which is just kinda wrong, with the exception of the gap during which they were working gung-ho on multiplayer.

John Lee fucked around with this message at 08:49 on Dec 18, 2022

Toshimo
Aug 23, 2012

He's outta line...

But he's right!
I think there's also a level of fatigue for games that are in early access for literal years at this point.

boxcarhobo
Jun 23, 2005

I don’t really care that there isn’t a marketplace, but limiting item trading to where I can’t even drop an item for my friend in a box for them to pick up later when I’m not online absolutely sucks and their reason seems to be that they are scared they can’t control the economy that would pop up around that? Stop trying to force me into your extended gameplay loop and let me have items that facilitate a build which makes clicking on the monsters feel good and powerful you loving dev weirdos (I’m also mad at Chris Wilson right now)

Deformed Church
May 12, 2012

5'5", IQ 81


John Lee posted:

Like, this sounds dubious, but if true: what is so brokebrained about the ARPG community that item trading is by a large margin the important part of multiplayer? Like, sure, some people love the economy side of things, Path of Exile exists for this reason, but I would have thought that the important part of playing with friends, and certainly the part I was interested in, was actually playing with them.

I think it's partly a timing thing - LE has been upcoming alongside the only major ARPG around having a protracted pants making GBS threads episode, and in PoEs system the most important part of multiplayer is item trading, so a big chunk of the audience is people who want the same thing but without archnemesis or harvest nerfs or whatever the big problem was when they quit PoE. A massive chunk of the people up for a new ARPG right now is people who want to spend long hours grinding the same poo poo to make numbers go up. And they've turned up here just in time to be told "oh no we're actually not doing that afterall." I'm not saying you're wrong about them being brokebrained weirdos (source: it's me), but they're here in numbers like it or not.

As for playing together, I think the content gap and very unfinished endgame have sucked a lot of potential enthusiasm. It's the same content you've been doing for the past six months, none of it particularly difficult, none of it requiring any additional level of communication or coordination. Maybe they'll implement stuff that actually incentivises playing in groups, but right now if you just want a hangout game why not play a co-op game that actually engages and rewards you for working together?

As someone who mostly wanted to play SSF anyway, it's just sapped all momentum the game had. I could understand stuff being on hold to develop a major, highly desirable feature, even if it wasn't for me, but they've spent most of the past year with actual content on hold to make something that's just pissed everyone off. What could we have had instead of this? Will driving away previously enthusiastic players and tanking their reviews impact their ability to keep releasing the stuff that was good?

Dallan Invictus
Oct 11, 2007

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes, look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

Dallan Invictus posted:

I think they'll struggle to find a replacement (for the Bazaar) that fits their stated goals but tbf they haven't had many misses so far so let's see what they come up with.

looks like I was right, alas

I'm honestly not that bothered because between loot dropping identified, powerful filters, and the crafting system it's a lot easier to get actually useful gear from killing things than in other games that actually depend on having An Economy.

Would it be nice to put items aside for my friends when we can't play together, sure, but much like D3, maybe if the drops don't suck it wouldn't actually be a) missed or b) worth letting players turn it into An Economy anyway, or making special dev effort to stop them that could be devoted towards something more fun?

Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Dec 18, 2022

Sylphosaurus
Sep 6, 2007

Toshimo posted:

I think there's also a level of fatigue for games that are in early access for literal years at this point.
Yeah, this is basically that way for me. I tend to wishlist games that look interesting in early access but then I tend to forget about them until they hit full release (or die on the vine).

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





Deformed Church posted:

I think it's partly a timing thing - LE has been upcoming alongside the only major ARPG around having a protracted pants making GBS threads episode, and in PoEs system the most important part of multiplayer is item trading, so a big chunk of the audience is people who want the same thing but without archnemesis or harvest nerfs or whatever the big problem was when they quit PoE. A massive chunk of the people up for a new ARPG right now is people who want to spend long hours grinding the same poo poo to make numbers go up. And they've turned up here just in time to be told "oh no we're actually not doing that afterall." I'm not saying you're wrong about them being brokebrained weirdos (source: it's me), but they're here in numbers like it or not.

Bit off topic, but it's probably been a couple of years since I last played PoE - can you point me at a summary of the latest protracted pants making GBS threads episode going on there?

As far as LE, I am definitely in the SSF category of player both here and when I played PoE, so the multiplayer stuff doesn't really impact me at all. I already gave them my money so I can't really protest against their treatment of employees with my wallet, so I'll probably pick it up again and play it for a while at some point (it's been almost a year now since I last played) just to scratch the itch.

marshalljim
Mar 6, 2013

yospos

interrodactyl posted:

If I find a good item for my friend but our schedules were off by 10 minutes, I can't give them the item. The reverse is also true.

How about if they added the ability to freely give away one item per day (or some other number tbd)? That's obviously inelegant, to say the least, but it seems like it would address some common complaints.

I feel for them, either way, because there is no easy answer to the trade question in general.

xZAOx
Sep 6, 2004
PORKCHOP SANDWICHES
This is fine to me. One of the worst things about Poe is that it's balanced around trade. For D3, if I want gear or anything, I can farm it myself in a reasonable manner.

And I play in parties *extensively* more in d3. The mechanics, or at least bounties, encourage it. Poe, the only actual group play is when guildees share map competition, which is done in a week (if not a few days).

The Locator posted:

Bit off topic, but it's probably been a couple of years since I last played PoE - can you point me at a summary of the latest protracted pants making GBS threads episode going on there?

Starting with 3.15 (3.20 just came out, league per quarter), the player numbers have been on an overall decline. They've made the early game, of all things, harder. They're trying to drastically slow down gameplay, and it's been bumpy. A few leagues ago was "archnemesis", where you fought special tough mobs. After that, they replaced all rare mobs with archnem mobs.

This.. pretty negatively impacted the game. Mob bosses didn't mean anything, only archnem. It really screwed over several mechanics like delve and blight because they didn't test it. They nerfed it, only to secretly unnerf it the next league.

Then we have Kalandra, last league. That stuff is going on, then they majorly changed how loot drops without saying anything. Loot was scarce as hell. They turned archnem into literal loot goblins where people would hire magic find cullers. They'd point to a streamer getting insanely lucky and say "see loot is fine". Plus the usual stuff of new league mechanic being too tough, too annoying, combined with poo poo rewards.

It's been their worst league by far. Players dropped off insanely hard.

Anyways, this league is great. Super fun apology league. Archnem removed (basically). There's still loot goblins, but you don't need a mf culler anymore. Loot comes at a reasonable pace. The new league mechanic needs some love, but overall it's super fun and refreshing (of course some hate it).

There were lots of other smaller things that kept happening too, but that's the broader stuff.

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





xZAOx posted:

Starting with 3.15 :words:

Thanks!

Deformed Church
May 12, 2012

5'5", IQ 81


To be a little more constructive, I wonder if you could allow players to freely trade within a persistent party, with restrictions or swapping groups (maybe a cooldown, or binding items to the group you were in when it dropped). That would prevent the kind of fast moving, large volume trading with strangers that's had such an impact on D3 and PoE, but allow people to play with their friends without worrying too much about schedules not lining up or someone with more free time being held back.

And keep the current system as well, so people who don't have a reliable group of friends to play with, or people who's group isn't keeping up, can still group up if/when there's content that incentivises it.

Vulpes
Nov 13, 2002

Well, shit.
Just allow trading items only with people who were on your friend list at the time the item dropped.

Papercut
Aug 24, 2005
Just allow trading items

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Elentor
Dec 14, 2004

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
The original plan was no trading - period. This was a high up decision. Karv pushed for limited trading as a compromise and a few of us, me included, supported because he required some voices. I further suggested that if we were not to have trading at all, to at least have a list of players or friends to whom one could share items with (which QA supported and we tentatively called group self-found) but it was shut down or never moved forward because of RMT concerns. I just said to disable group self-found parties from the ladder then.

I was in favor of free trading but since a game economy was deemed a hard no by design we had to try to circumvent it as much as possible to give you the D3 model.

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