Path of Exile

Looks like Bestiary is going the way of the dodo. I approve. Hopefully they’ve learned a lesson about making overly complex mechanics that don’t fit into the flow of the core game.

Yeah, I just sort of bounced off Bestiary. I had no desire to figure it out even though I mostly play SSF so the crafting options were nice to have.

In flashback news I did decide to play (at least until Pillar 2 comes out) and surprisingly changed my build midgame to lightning trap which I’m having a lot of fun with. I still keep a 4-link cremation for single target and just additional dps as it’s a trap with sustained damage allowing me to keep throwing lightning traps while the cremation stays active for 8 seconds or so.

I tried Bestiary and bounced off, too. Never made it past early mapping. The mechanics just felt jarring and annoying rather than adding to the core gameplay.

That said, some mechanism to craft levelling gear to smooth out early progression for SSF is a solid goal and they should definitely keep working on that.

Upcoming league looks really interesting:

Between this and the skill revamps I’m glad I passed on the flashback so I can start Incursion completely fresh.

That looks excellent.

New league does look great, I’m quite looking forward to it.

In flashback I found my first ever 6 link (non-Tabula) drop, then my first ever Vis Mortis, and 6-linked that in about 100 fusing orbs. So now I’m starting to level a second character to 85 for more drawing chances; I never really get into a spectre build but I figure if it ever happens it’ll be with a 6-linked Vis.

Not getting much Pillars 2 time in, PoE just keeps dragging me back and it looks like the new league will keep that up. I guess that means I just keep throwing the gaming money at GGG instead of someone else. And don’t add up the total, I don’t want to know.

for anyone playing the other PoE game…

Beginning of the end?

download

Impossible to say.

Based on what’s gone on at Riot after the Tencent purchase, no (mind you, I think LoL is not in a great place right now but it’s entirely Riot’s own fault. The spring split meta was inexplicably bad). But that’s just one example of two western devs Tencent has purchased (Clash of Clans being the other, but I can’t speak to anything on that end).

The real question is this: does the Tencent investment empower what GGG want to do with 4.0? If yes, then it’s probably not a bad thing in the short to medium run. If not, well I guess we’ll just have to see.

What I hate is whenever these acquisitions happen (and lets face it, that’s what an 80% stake is. It’s not just “investing in” at that point), the former owner always comes out touting how Corporate Owner has no interest whatsoever in having control over the product in any way. It’s either (mildly) offensively false or a striking naivety on the part. You hear it every time a company is acquired by EA for instance, and it’s never the case.

No entity lays out that kind of cash without expecting a return. And if/when that return doesn’t happen, you can bet they flex their muscles and “fix” things so it does.

Path Of Exiles business model has always been way too generous in my opinion, I’d be really surprised if someone forking over a bunch of money didn’t feel the same way. The current set of people there are very passionate about the game, the people entering into this are very passionate about money. That combo never ends well.

As long as the only change is a Tencent logo someplace on the loading screen, no problem. As soon as it affects gameplay negatively, and I’m sure it will someday, I’m out.

It might be the beginning of the end and still not be a bad thing. I’ve been playing this for 4 or 5 years now; at some point I’m going to move on. I only play the temp leagues and short (preferably 1-2 hour) races, GGG has stopped doing short races due to lack of resources. I wasn’t overwhelmed by Harbinger or Bestiary leagues, although I am feeling the Incursion hype.

Short term maybe I’ll get what I consider a proper race season again in a league or two. After I start losing interest completely, Tencent’s resources could help greatly with PoE2 or whatever comes next.

And yet, acquisitions do happen where it’s nothing like EA acquiring someone. I just named one. Don’t let me get in the way of you deciding how this has already played out though.

What does this even mean?

Well 4.0 is next in terms of being a “big thing” (2020, yes it’s a ways out). Apparently there are big plans there, Ziggy was talking about it yesterday (mind you, no specifics; he’s NDA bound). Also, Tencent is apparently interested in racing, so I think racing will probably benefit overall from this.

Well…you can play the game for 500 hours and never pay a cent…that would be my definition of too generous. They are leaving money on the table, I’m sure someone realises that.

Dayum, 'just; a majority stake, either! 80%!

Not sure I can blame them. PoE is a powerhouse. One of the pinnacles of the genre, amazingly generous F2P model, superb dedication from the GGG team over the years resulting in continual improvement, expansion and experimentation, excellent player reception, engagement, loyalty and by reasonable assumption sustainable revenue.

But is that revenue enough for them to do what they want to do next? Expand into new markets? Reach customers on a wider range of devices? Work on spin-off titles, completely new projects or PoENext? Just capitalise on their success and retire? PoE is a solid brand at this point, with probably pretty decent DAU numbers. This must represent a pretty decent cash injection for GGG…or payout for the founders.

Time will tell I guess, but I hope this does not have a detrimental effect. I have always been happy to throw money at PoE because the model is so generous. If the quality and content keeps coming, I’ll keep doing that even if it means I am need to more directly pay for non-MTX content (assuming no P2W creeps in).

And if this is the first step to GGG’s founders cashing out and moving on to their next steps, well so be it, they earned it.

I never made any claim to know how this plays out. I just said that no one lays out the cash for an 80% acquisition without an eye for the financial return. It’s possible PoE continues to make enough money under their current model that they remain hands off but if not of course Tencent is going to make some executive decisions as the new owner.

And yet plenty of people do pay cents (and quite a few at that) GGG was doing well before this (they were up to 100 people. although I am going to assume the hires going back some months were done with this move in mind). Tencent publishers quite a few FTP games with microtransaction stores, if memory serves. This is nothing new for them.

While GGG was doing well, the amount of money they were making outside of China wouldn’t register noticably if it was added or removed from Tencent’s total books.

If GGG were still owners, and the next 3-4 (say) leagues flopped, there would be drastic changes. I’m not sure if this didn’t occur to you or what. “If POE doesn’t return an investment, there will be changes!” is banal. That said, I was commenting on the fact that you are insisting things are going to change. Which, actually, that’s sort of banal too.

Of course all sorts of things change internally, Dave Brevik talked about this some in a recent stream. But that’s not what Chris Wilson is talking about when he says “nothing is going to change”. He’s talking about how the game is developed/who is going to be primarily responsible for dictating content. I have uncovered no evidence that Tencent will change this so far. Apparently they didn’t in Clash of Clans and they sure didn’t in League of Legends (although if they did influence the decision to remove the old rune system, that’s arguably a positive). As I also said, Tencent was already requesting features for China and that will continue. Chris has said that if anything they do over there seems like a good idea to bring to the rest of the world they will. Makes sense.

What EA (or anyone else) does is irrelevant. What’s relevant is what Tencent has done and will do. That said, Tencent didn’t do this with the hopes that POE would do well in China. This announcement came nine months to the day POE released in China. They have 9 months of data to chew on. From their perspective, this was always in the works. That is, if POE got off to a good start they would want to acquire GGG (it saves them money), and if it didn’t no biggie. This likely means there were encouraging growth trends that triggered the move.

Some new business people were hired specifically so Chris could stick to the development side, apparently. So he wants to be more hands on over there. Another great point that Brevik made was that being rich changes things (again, this is not the sort of change Wilson was talking about in his quote), so it will be interesting to see how that affects the former owners of GGG going forward, even if there is no immediate change.

GGG is apparently up to 100 and change employees now. Last I checked I think it was 60something to 70something. I wonder how many hires were made as a leadup to this move, and whether there will be more. Part of me thinks that a big engine overhaul could be the result of this move. That assumes that there are things GGG wanted that were beyond “well, we’re comfortable” and of course I can only speculate.

I would like to see GGG come out and address some of this. Without getting into specifics, at least talk a little bit about how they think this will benefit the game more. Even if it’s just “we’ve got a round of hires coming, and hope to dedicate people to these broad areas”.

Another think I would like to see (h/t to a dude on ZiggyD’s stream) is someone asking about whether Tencent wants to look at the data from players outside of China. They may not care (they can’t force any of us into a social credit system, after all).

Would you like a few patch notes? Tough, you’re getting a lot of patch notes.