Does GGG Play this game?

I wanted to post a bit about my experience so far with 0.2.0f. First of all, this last patch made 0.2 playable which is nice. Prior to this patch it really felt like the dev team hasn't been play testing much if at all. Now, it feels just playable but ultimately not a better experience.

New bugs are fun, but I don't know if that's what I keep running into. I get this sudden freeze randomly where after about 15 seconds the game will come back to a black screen with the ggg cogs. Then I'll be immediately back in the game where sometimes the monsters have progressed by a couple seconds, and sometimes my own character will move as well. Very strange. Additionally, this sort of graphical reloading will tend to make my game harder because some effects don't appear the same way they did before. Rituals become unplayable because I cannot see the chaos blood boils, and sometimes I can't see volatile plants still. Another reason I can't stand rituals follow in the next paragraph. Also, what is the deal with the cleansed zone spiders not consistently exploding on death? I don't think it is because of my build but maybe I am wrong in thinking that only shattering enemies can prevent on death explosions.

I find the progression in late game very frustrating. I am playing a SSF Gas Arrow Amazon character that is using a build that looks for a few uniques to improve quality of life. I can go without the death's harp that I luckily got 2 dropped at this point, but some encounters are very challenging because I can't immediately blow everything up using the radient grief ability- always ignite enemies on hit. Aren't we supposed to have options? Why is there seemingly only one way for me to ignite all enemies on hit? Therefore, I have to set up explosions with fire wall. That is fine because combos are fun, but this has been an issue throughout the entire early access for me: If I can't kill everything by just looking at it, then I run the risk of being one-shot. Even after spending many hours, where I have max all resistances and chaos resistance, 1480 HP, 81% evasion. I think I would have to be really lucky to get more life on gear without losing damage, and crafting is just a time waste at this point outside of reforging some boots, belts, jewelry. (Time played 2days, 18hrs, give or take a few hours afk time). This same issue happened with my characters in the standard league: I was able to kill things quickly, however, reload time, attack speed, or cast speed can still be too slow for my damage to matter. I could have 2k life pool + huge evasion + a little es, or 4k+ energy shield and still have to actively stay away from literally every enemy to where I cannot see them on my screen. Getting too eager will just be running the risk of dying before I can react or reposition, and there is definitely not enough time to know what kills me in half of these situations. What is the point of building resistances if I constantly die to one or two hits that I can't avoid within 1 second? What is the point of grinding for better gear when I have to face down the same annoying monsters over again? The abomination of floor clutter on many maps is an additional combatant in its own way, adding to the chaotic gameplay that makes it hard to track everything from second to second.

Conclusion
While I may be leaving some stuff out so I can do something better with my time, I'm just trying to voice how I am frustrated with how I've played this game like a part time job since release, and I am starting to feel like the developers aren't playing it themselves. I want to see a few hours of them streaming and how they avoid getting obliterated by monsters constantly. Monster damage scaling doesn't seem to make sense relative to the damage that I can do to them. I honestly can't bother trying to go for pinnacle content at this point because in 0.1, I died immediately on my first attempt at copper citadel even after being comfortable in t15/t16 maps. Now, I am hard stuck at t8 maps because most packs of monsters can one shot me faster than I can properly clear with my combo, which is literally just a right click, half second cast, left click shoot arrow barrage and immediately kill. It feels like flipping a coin with extra steps.

It absolutely seems as if they don't. They last talk with Ziz really shed light on it.

hardly.

They made it extremely obvious that all they do is import characters to test things like "are there enough one shot mechanics?" "does this feel really bad and make the player want to quit our game?" and "Is this combo fun?" when looking to nerf things. I am 100% convinced they do not farm their own gear or currency when testing things. There is no way they could.

The developers do play their own game, and quite frequently, but they are playing it with a different mindset and purpose which can possibly lead them astray.

When GGG staff are playing the game they're looking to see whether the mechanics are working as intended, gauging how the experience "flows," and that sort of internal analysis. By nature of their job - and it being a job - they're focused more on "does this work?" than on "is this fun/engaging?".

An example of this fostering a disconnect with players could be the XP loss on death. This isn't going to feel so punishing when you're importing high level characters to test content because you don't have the investment of it being "your" character and, crucially, you aren't playing to progress. As a result, something frustrating to players seems a non-issue to testers.

Yep I guess the QA guys never play the endgame thoroughly. Too many bugs could be fixed before 0.2 patched was released, if they did the quality assurance stuff.

If someone is playing poe/poe2 in its entirety, they won't have much time for developing it. Same is true for the reverse.

There quite literally is not enough time in someone's day to do both well. So they outsourced the majority of play testing to us.

Why play? Why test? The VISION is infallible... and so is the man with it.

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Poetryinbullets#3451 написал:

An example of this fostering a disconnect with players could be the XP loss on death. This isn't going to feel so punishing when you're importing high level characters to test content because you don't have the investment of it being "your" character and, crucially, you aren't playing to progress. As a result, something frustrating to players seems a non-issue to testers.

XP loss from death is completely warranted because if you keep progressing through levels and are close to or at max from dieing often and never really figure out how to become strong the conclusion will be the player at an even bigger loss.

There are many games that hinder progression via a players inability to understand how to be strong (Elden Ring, League of Legends and many more) that are loved, its totally bizarre to exempt because of "traditions of the genre" or some other pathetic "genre" excuse.

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WobbleTop#3482 написал:

I find the progression in late game very frustrating. I am playing a SSF

Oh, SSF? You mean the game mode that was specifically created to have a more frustrating progression because you don't have access to the trade economy?

I don't know how many times we need to have this conversation, but SSF isn't just "the same game but I don't have to trade." They're not going to rebalance drop rates so you can play SSF and have just as much loot as people get by trading.

If you want to play SSF you're denying yourself access to the trade market around which drop rates and loot are balanced, so of course that's going to get frustrating. That's the whole point to the mode. If you don't enjoy that then fix it yourself by not playing SSF.