Path of Exile - Community Q&A

The Path of Exile developers decided to head to their forums recently to answer some community questions regarding the games future.

Last week we asked the community for questions for our developers to answer. We received dozens pages of questions and have spent the week answering most of the ones from the first six pages. We're going to have to answer more of these questions in a follow-up post soon!

Originally, the intent of "Unique" tier items was to have... well, "Unique" items, that weren't going to be better than well-crafted Rares, but in some cases would enable different playstyles... Is this still the overall intent of Uniques? There's a few Uniques that are overwhelmingly Best-in-Slot for a lot of builds, and I was wondering if these were exceptions, or perhaps Uniques that worked out better than intended, or if you've relaxed the original design choice for Uniques?

Our preference is that most characters use rare items with just a few unique items. This will vary by build, with the most combo-ish ones requiring many unique items, and mundane damage dealers (like my favourite type of hardcore Marauder build) using almost entirely rare items.

It's very hard to hit exactly the right power level when designing a unique item. Some of them underachieve because the community doesn't work out their full potential, and some of them become far more powerful than you planned due to the community coming up with crazy combos that the developers didn't think of. That concept is the core beauty of Path of Exile's character customisation.

In addition, many of the most powerful uniques involve design-a-unique supporters who have very valid reasons for their unique being powerful. They want something people will care about, to leave a true mark on the game. It's very hard to hit the right power level here, especially as the metagame changes over time. To use a specific example, we nerfed Soul Taker many times internally before releasing it. It was a shadow of its former power. However, the vocal part of the community were outraged that we released such a powerful item, completely invalidating the process of crafting a rare one-handed axe. I kind of agreed with them, and wished we had pushed the nerfs harder. A few years later, I receive mail asking when we're going to buff Soul Taker to get it up to an appropriate power level.

What are the pros and cons of having high player power vs the environment?

Players like to feel powerful. Philosophically, we want people to look forward to coming home from work so that they can load up Path of Exile, smash some monsters and get better items for their characters. The power creep towards fast clear speed has definitely helped this feeling.

On the other hand, there are several negative issues we're dealing with. Higher clear speed means more combat going on per second. This affects both the server performance (costing us more money) and the client performance (in some cases, making it hard for people with lower machines to play in parties). These are areas that we're tackling at the moment with technology changes.

While some players and developers are concerned about the clear speeds, there's the subtle issue that now players are used to the rate of item acquisition from that speed. If we substantially rebalanced things so that it's a little slower, then this would affect the rate at which players accumulate wealth. It's very hard to say whether the prolonged playtime would offset the frustration of progressing more slowly.

Have you seen improvements in player retention with the subsequent improvements to content clear times?

Player retention is marginally better and players play for around 25% longer each day compared to the time period when gameplay was slower. We can debate all day about whether it's due to the clear times or not. I suspect it's that people want to feel powerful, rather than finish the maps quickly.

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What's your stance on all the exploiters and peoples abusing various bugs and unwanted mechanics during the first days or weeks of a league, either breaking the economy or gaining unfair advantage? Is there anything done to act against those and protect the whole playerbase?

There are several factors in play here. The first is that Path of Exile is designed for players to try to take advantage of knowledge and gain economic advantage over other players. If you work out a smart way to craft, or you find a build that lets you get to Uber Atziri first and offer her uniques up for sale at top prices, then you are winning at Path of Exile. This is a game that rewards you for being smart.

As for people crossing the line and exploiting the game by abusing bugs, this is something that both happens far less than you think, and often is actually attributed to non-abusive behaviour coupled with tall stories. We often see people claiming exploits to explain how they got rich, but then when we investigate the accounts we find more mundane behaviour like faked screenshots, wealth pooling, RMT or just lucky drops.

Having said that, people who actually exploit the game are generally mercilessly banned along with their co-conspirators. It's usually pretty clear where the line is here.

Why haven't all basic skill gems been made available to all classes from vendors? Everyone hates making mule characters to get gems, and trading for them over and over again is annoying at best.

Surprisingly, not everyone hates characters having identity. There's a bit of a slippery slope when trying to optimise for the type of player that wants to instantly gain access to gems from all character classes. For them it's a harmless change, but for most of the playerbase it'd be hugely overwhelming and would break the immersion of you being offered appropriate choices for your character. I'm not saying we won't do this, but we'd need to find the right way to do it.