chris_wilson

I haven’t stepped down as a director of GGG, but there was a paperwork mistake where I was missed off the list when the annual return was filed this week. We complained about it yesterday and it should be corrected in the next few days.

I'm just going to reply to this one comment because I need to take a break from this. But I have seen this sentiment a few times and I wanted to address it.

Please re-read the post we made yesterday. It clarifies that drops for average players are where they were before. You find 25% more currency from regular content than you did before the expansion deployed, for example. You find more than 50% more unique items from regular content!

There is no winning the lottery needed. This is a misconception that is causing a lot of damage and I don't know where it came from. The whole point of all of this was to tone down the lottery wins to not be 15k unique items and to be more appropriate. So the very few elite people took a hit (but are still doing fine) and everyone else benefited. Somehow it created the perception that we did the exact opposite.

In this post I want to discuss an illegal third-party program which allows players to see what Pantheon Archnemesis Mods are preloaded in a map, in order to farm the valuable ones. This has been a hot topic in the community and there is a lot of misunderstanding related to it. I will describe the mitigations we took proactively during implementation and a hotfix that we made today that solves the issue entirely.

The short explanation is that we had already considered and mostly mitigated this exploit when we implemented Archnemesis mods, so it wasn't of much value to take advantage of, but we have now completely eliminated it.

Here's the longer explanation, if you're interested in technical details:

Some Archnemesis modifiers are more valuable than others because they perform drop conversion (for example, converting all the drops to currency items). These modifiers are the ones attached to Pantheon mods, and hence have quite large visual effects that consist...

We took countermeasures months ago so that this type of tool would not be possible. I will check to make sure those are intact but I am pretty sure that this is not possible.

Edit: I'll just add some more detail before I fall asleep:

The hypothesis with this tool is that it checks what mods are preloaded upon entering the instance. Even if this were effective (which I believe it is not, due to our countermeasures):

a) You wouldn't have any information about whether the mod is on a 3 or 4 mod rare monster or whether it stacks with any other mod.

b) You would have to juice each map speculatively (which is very wasteful if you're just discarding them without playing), or spawn them with no juice, removing much of the benefit of even doing the exploit in the first place.

Please don't be fooled by scary-looking posts that look authoritative. We have considered this extensively when designing the system.

Lake of Kalandra saw a number of balance changes that were not properly communicated before release. After a week of addressing feedback with hotfixes, we have written this post to explain what our intention was, what went wrong, how we have fixed it, and to reassure you about the direction we intend to go in the future.

There's a bit of backstory to explain. I want to start by describing three philosophies that have been guiding our decisions recently:

Philosophy One: Reward mechanisms should scale properly with Item Quantity and Rarity bonuses

For the last few years, we have been using what we internally call item templates to control what drops from league content. This is where a monster (often with a reward symbol over its head) drops a specific type of item when it is killed.

But Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards. You can roll your maps to be harder or add sextants ...

In a patch in the next day or so, we will be reducing the impact of a lot of defensive Archnemesis Modifiers. This post explains why and lists a preliminary version of the changes.

Archnemesis modifiers are meant to make combat more challenging. Even more so when two synergistic mods stack together to create an especially dangerous emergent behaviour. However, this philosophy is mostly meant to apply to offensive mods, rather than defensive ones.

We want defensive modifiers to exist, and these implicitly make rare monsters harder for certain builds to kill. However, we absolutely agree that it's frustrating when multiple similar mods stack together and extend the length of the fight exponentially. A build affected by this has no way to get around the mods, other than enduring a long fight or running away from the monster.

We have nerfed many defensive modifiers. Our primary goal is so that when two similar defensive modifiers stack together, they don't make ...

We will deploy a patch soon that significantly improves item drops throughout Path of Exile. This post broadly describes the major changes. Detailed patch notes will be posted later.

We have massively increased the rarity bonus for items dropped by monsters with multiple Archnemesis mods. This is proportional to difficulty, so there's a moderate improvement for two mods, a large improvement for three mods and a huge improvement for four mods.

We have massively increased the rarity of items dropped by Map Bosses. They now act like late Act Bosses, dropping fewer normal and magic items but many more rare and unique items.

We have globally increased the drop rate of unique items by 33%. In addition, with the massive item rarity bonuses added to map bosses and multiple-mod rare monsters, they will drop many more uniques than before.

We have globally increased the base drop rate of currency ite...

Over the weekend, we launched Path of Exile: Lake of Kalandra. The deployment was very smooth with no major technical issues and only some minor hotfixing required over the weekend. We reached a peak of 250k concurrent players. Today we have been processing feedback from the first two days of the league, and have a number of balance and content adjustments we plan to make to address much of this feedback. This post describes our current plan.

Archnemesis

There's quite a large jump in difficulty from the campaign to early maps as the number of archnemesis mods on monsters rises abruptly. This not only affects their average difficulty, but also how tanky they are. We are going to taper this up more smoothly so that it's a more gradual progression (and is unmodified in red maps). This will result in less difficulty and less life on average for rare monsters below red maps.

To prevent life values getting out of hand on special league monsters wi...

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This is the best

We worked out what this was a few days ago and have a fix that can be deployed in the next patch. The bug was in the game for six years. Deploying the fix almost feels sad now!

Lol oopsp

So far we have numerically reduced their difficulty (link) and have reduced the quantity that spawn on rare monsters (link). There are two more areas of feedback that we'd like to address.

Specific Mods (and how they affect certain builds)...

After making some numerical balance changes yesterday, we are now making a functional change to how Archnemesis Modifiers spawn on rare monsters. Previously, rare monsters you encountered generally had two Archnemesis mods, but could spawn with as many as three or four. Now, they will default to one modifier, with a chance of having two or three. Update: We have deployed this patch as a serverside hotfix.

Archnemesis mods are designed so that certain pairs are very challenging to overcome. And we are generally pretty happy with the difficulty of those particular encounters if they occur infrequently. However, moder...

Okay, we shipped them a little overtuned. We have just deployed a hotfix that reduces rare monster life and damage and slightly reduces that of magics.

I'll explain how this occurred.

Transitioning from the old monster mod system to Archnemesis was meant to make rare and magic monster fights more challenging. And it certainly did. We tested it extensively, and were happy with the level of difficulty when we released it. In general, we feel that in Path of Exile it's better to introduce things slightly too challenging than slightly too easy, and so we awaited player feedback and death data to see if it was actually too hard for the average player.

Well, 12 hours of feedback and data is enough to know that we need to take the edge off the difficulty. Rare and magic monsters are still going to be hard, just not as difficult as they were today. We will follow up with more tweaks (including to more specific mods) in the coming days once we get time to process spe...

We fixed this as soon as we could after becoming aware of it.

We're very sorry about this bug. This doesn't reach the threshold of warranting an entire race restart, due to the nature of the bug, the number of people affected and how early we are in what may be quite a long race.

Honeymoon in Wraeclast!

Congratulations btw

There has been a little confusion about how to discover Archnemesis Recipes, so I thought I'd post to explain how it works.

When designing Archnemesis, we realised there was a spectrum for how we could handle recipe discoverability. On one hand, recipes could be completely secret, not data-mineable, and would require weeks of community collaboration to discover them all. While we felt that this would have a cool sense of discovery, it didn't really fit with the fast pace of Path of Exile's league start, where players want to experience a lot of what a league offers in the first days.

On the other end of the spectrum, we could have zero secrets whatsoever, and just publish a full recipe list in the game client so that you immediately have full information. The problem with this approach is that it completely removes a sense of discovery for players who do actually enjoy expanding their knowledge of recipes as they play.

The system we came up with was designed...

Thank you! We were really pleased to see it go so well. This was mostly due to the hard work that our team put in polishing off this release over the last few weeks. Thanks, everyone!

This isn't a suggested solution. I am describing the situation/history of the problem so that our reasoning is clear. We haven't suggested any solutions yet but will think about it when the team are back early next year.