devtrackers.gg
I’m sorry it’s felt this way, however I guarantee you we listen to as many players as possible - not just pay attention to streamers. We’re often watching the forums, in game chat, reddit, and steam. Even if we don’t actively respond to the threads as we want to let the community have a conversation without our influence, we’re reading and discussing it. We regularly bring up community posts within the team and discuss them. However this doesn’t mean we’ll always change things to match your requests, or implement your requests, but we certainly try to be listening and adjusting the game based on as much feedback as we can.
I don’t like to say things to influence how players play the game, but I think you’ll find many long term players don’t agree with this in LE. We’ve created a resistance system that isn’t nearly as punishing as many other ARPG’s, and recently we’ve actually been getting a lot of feedback regarding defensive layers and how resistance can offer so little compared to other options for effective HP. But defences in general is a topic we’ve been discussing a lot more again recently.
I can’t really say too much regarding this at the moment. We will have a trading blog post out in the coming months. We’re certainly still listening to feedback on the topic.
This is a very hard topic to really talk about. There’s very few builds that cannot complete all intended content in the game, however with an infinitely scaling system, there will always be builds that can push further than others, and it’s something we’ll always be looking to balance. It depends on player perceptions of what “viable” is, because as you’ve stated here, being able to complete intended content is not “viable” for you. This comes into how we would look to re-balance things - player perceptions. Right now we’re making a big push for multiplayer, but we’re certainly not done with balancing by any means.
The majority of content is designed to be accessible, with the option of infinite scaling in some endgame systems to take things to wherever you want it to be. This is another hard topic, but for a different reason. Player views can differ greatly on this topic, but similarly, it’s something we always have our ears to the ground on and make adjustments based on feedback. For those that were playing when Sands of Majasa was first released I think can provide input on how we’ve adjusted difficulty of certain boss fights based on feedback. As Majasa was the final story boss for the current moment, she was originally designed to be a ‘much’ more difficult fight - but more people were having a negative experience in the fight with less conventional builds; taking it back to an earlier topic of wanting intended content to be accessible/viable for as many builds as possible.
This is a pretty massive topic to be honest. We used to have the ability to re-roll echo modifiers before we released the Monolith rework, however we saw issues coming down the road. Being able to be so picky with modifiers actually limits builds, since certain defensive mechanics may be particularly strong against a certain subset of negative echo modifiers it can easily create a system in which only builds with those defensive layers and picking those modifiers is accepted as the “viable” playstyle. There’s far more to it than that as well, but off the top of my head, that’s one of the big drawbacks to allowing this level of specificity with modifiers. Path of exile gets around this by forcing a number of modifiers at once, so even though you can keep re-rolling modifiers for a cost, you’ll can’t be super specific without a massive cost. Currently we only add one modifier at a time, so we have to counter by not having extremely easy high specificity with modifiers. We also try to ensure no modifiers completely shut down any build style, though they can certainly effect some builds more than others (eg. how damage type reflect can be a 100% no-go for many builds in other games).
This is something we’re absolutely aware of and looking into making changes to address. We’ve lightly discussed it a couple of times on our dev streams, but we certainly want to make changes to mapping to provide more incentive to explore more of the map / kill more enemies rather than just rush the objective. In Path of Exile this is done with opportunity cost - to enter the map you have to “spend” a map, so there’s incentive to get as much in return as possible. We don’t have a cost of entry in monolith of fate, so we’re looking into other methods to incentivize more map exploration.
Again, none of this means we’re not listening to feedback, or that we’re not going to be considering yours, and others input on these matters. I just wanted to provide some of our current thoughts on some of the items you’ve brought up. Thank you for taking the time to write out your thoughts, the feedback is greatly appreciated.