Performative Transparency

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Good Morning Folks. It is a bit of a rough day for the Path of Exile community. More specifically it is a rough time for the folks who were Path of Exile 1 players looking forward to the 3.26 League. While there were not hard dates surrounding it, comments made by the development team around the launch of Path of Exile II Early Access indicated that we could expect the next league to land late January or Early February. We are now in that window and there has been a growing unrest among the player base hungry for information about the next league. The new trials for Path of Exile II are almost universally loathed by the community, causing an surge of Izaro memes. One of the biggest is a thread that has been doubling the number of images of Izaro every single day until we get news regarding the launch date of 3.26.

We can’t really work on POE1 3.26 until 0.2.0 has shipped. And being honest, we probably need to support that for a couple of weeks as well.

Jonathan Rogers

We got that news… and it was not good. It turns out that Path of Exile 3.26 is not coming anytime soon. Effectively the entire Path of Exile team has been pulled to help resolve the massive issues with Path of Exile II. I think a lot of my poor sentiment over this is being influenced right now by the fact that I am reading Play Nice, the book about the downfall of Blizzard by Jason Schreier. I just finished the passage last night where they talked about how World of Warcraft effectively consumed every available resource from every other team in the company. It certainly feels like we are seeing something similar playing out with Path of Exile II as it is consuming all available attention as the game that put Grinding Gear Games on the map suffers.

During the 2019 Exile Con presentation about Path of Exile II, Chris Wilson talked about how they were concerned about splitting the player base, and why they were planning on making Path of Exile II as a content expansion to the original game. Over the years of pandemic era silence this scope was changed, but effectively Chris Wilson’s prophecy has played out. There are a lot of players that did not really enjoy Path of Exile II, a largely group that I am part of that did not like it as much, and then a whole slew of players who were brand new to the franchise and have no clue what they are missing. The choice to focus on a game that is in Early Access, is a purely financial choice. Path of Exile II sold better than they expected and still has peak concurrency higher than some Path of Exile leagues. However for many it also feels like a Betrayal of the promises that Path of Exile was not going to get lost in the hype.

It is inexcusable for a player to be able to leave your game without knowing the date they are returning to it.

Chris Wilson

As a result… players on the subreddit are taking to using the company’s own words against them. It does in many ways feel like in the push to get Path of Exile II out the door, they have backpedaled on a number of the core tenants that they talked about in this widely viewed 2019 GDC talk. For the outsiders who were never part of this community prior to the launch of the early access, this probably seems odd. The thing that you need to understand is that we were effectively promised that the development of Path of Exile II would not cause the development of Path of Exile 1 to slip.

The release cadence that made Path of Exile the game that it is today is essentially built around the concept of four releases per year. Two would be larger releases, two would be smaller releases, but effectively every three to four months the player base had another league to engage with. The entire flow of Path of Exile centers around the league launch, and then also the fall off of the game after a month or two depending on how successful that league was. At the time of writing this the current league, Settlers of Kalguur launched on July 26th, 2024 and is 188 days old. Prior to this the longest league was Crucible, another league that was pushed out due to work on Path of Exile II at 130 days. They have not been able to hit the target cadence since 2021 with the Sentinel league, which I can only assume also has been impacted by the development of Path of Exile II.

Back in October, I gave Jonathan Rogers a good deal of credit for the communications and transparency when they had to push back the launch of Path of Exile II Early Access. The thing is… this video format of him sitting in the interview suite delivering a fireside chat, only really works so often. This is the fourth of these that I can personally remember, talking about unfortunate events and delivering a public address over whatever issue happens to be going on. What we need is better communication before the train derails. Even in this video he as much indicates that he knew that they were not going to hit the target for 3.26 before they left on holiday break. That is the point where you should have opened up to the community. Many of us were excited to have a new Path of Exile League on the near horizon, and as such it didn’t quite matter so much that the current state of Path of Exile II was pretty shitty. It was “early access” after all, and we had a better game to get excited for soon.

The other thing that really hurts is the loss of Bex, the long time community manager for Grinding Gear Games. She’s been gone since August of 2023, but has never really been replaced in the types of interactions that she had with the community, nor the regularity of communications. We’ve also had the inexplicable loss of Chris Wilson, the previous figurehead of Grinding Gear Games and to the best of my knowledge the last time we heard from him was at the release of the Necropolis league. I get that Mark Roberts and Jonathan Rogers have stepped up into their roles as leads of Path of Exile I and Path of Exile II respectively… but it still feels weird to not hear the iconic and much memed line anymore: “Hi, I’m Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games”.

So what do we know? We know that the teams are actively working on Path of Exile II 0.2.0 and we do not have a release date for that, but it will be a massive balance patch that comes with a league reset. Since no timing has been announced yet, I figure that is probably at least a month if not two out. We also know that they will not begin work in earnest on Path of Exile 3.26 until that has launched and that it has been given a few weeks of burn in. So I figure at this point the earliest we will see a new Path of Exile league is April potentially May. In April, the Settlers league will be over 260 days old at that point… so they need to at least throw us some sort of bone. Now is the time for them to dust off some major event like Endless Delve to give players something to focus on while they wait. The NecroSettlers Event was not terribly well received, and that league is effectively dead. I looked to see if I could find a pseudo-six-link helm yesterday and there was exactly one for sale… and it was 260 Divines.

In a perfect world, Eleventh Hour Games would use this opportunity and timeline slippage to slide in and launch Season 2 of Last Epoch. I do not think that is likely, but unfortunately that also means that 3.26 and Season 2 are likely going to be landing around the same time. If I have to choose between the two games I am going to be playing Last Epoch. I don’t want to have to make that choice, but I feel like I am way more excited about the endgame changes coming to the monolith, even though we don’t exactly know what they are. No matter what GGG rolls out with 3.26, it will not be anywhere near enough to make up for the year long Settlers league. This whole sequence has been a real hit to my faith in Grinding Gear Games as a whole. Again… like I said at the top I am reading Play Nice the book about the downfall of Blizzard, and I am honestly seeing some themes playing out here as well. I hope they can pull out of this, but they are essentially spending the goodwill of the player base right now.

Anyways… are you impacted by this announcement? Do you even care about Path of Exile 1? Drop me a line below.

Big Boisterous Boss Bonanza

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Morning Folks! The truth of Diablo IV is that it is not necessarily the most compelling game on the planet, but it absolutely nails one aspect. It is easy, seamless, and non-punitive to group up and do content with your friends. I think above all else that is the main reason why this is going to remain in the rotation of games for me, because it gives a good meet up destination for me and Ace to hang out and slaughter demons together. I love Path of Exile, but it feels bad to group with other players. Everything about the calculus of grouping makes it feel overly punishing, whereas Diablo IV has nothing but benefits when it comes to hanging out with friends. Ace had a bad day, and I also have not had the most wonderful week so far… so as a result we decided to hunker down and burn through a bunch of bosses last night.

That really is the biggest benefit of Diablo IV, that grouping especially when it comes to bossing is a force multiplier… not necessarily in the time to kill but definitely in the access to loot. I took a screenshot of my materials tab before the night and at the end of the night, and we burned through so many bosses it was silly. We gave up on Varshan though, because after four trips to vendor/salvage it just felt silly to keep going given how largely unrewarding that boss feels. Essentially we did the rotation of Beast in the Ice, Varshan, Grigoire, and Zir first so that we would then have more summons for the two best bosses Andariel and Duriel.

Going into the night I really only wanted two things. I needed a good Ancestral copy of Ring of Mendeln, and a good Ancestral copy of Blood Moon Breeches. Thankfully I walked away with multiple copies of both so that I could spend some painstaking time evaluating all of them to determine which one I would end up using. Additionally I think I picked up a few good copies of every Necromancer specific unique just in case I needed to swap builds at some point. I might try and kit out a full second set of gear and try Blood Wave, since it is so relatively easy to swap between builds now thanks to the armory. Essentially if you need uniques… you need to be running the summoned bosses because that seems to be the only reliable way to get them. Ace got my luck and walked away with two Mythics, and unfortunately I walked away with none… but last league I think I got 5 to their 2 so we will call it even.

I wish I had a good count of just how many boss summons we did last night, but I did not keep track. I know I carried Ace through a 50 Pit before the evening so we could attempt to farm on Torment 3… which was doable but just went a bit too slow and we bumped it down to T2. At the end of the evening I drug them through a Pit 65 so that they could begin to play with Torment 4. Past that we did run a 10 Wave Infernal Hordes on Torment 3, just so we could stockpile some obducite to masterwork the ancestral uniques we got. It was a pretty great night and essentially wall to wall boss and monster killing. No better way to soothe the soul.

I’ve knocked out three objectives on the final tier of the Seasons Journey, but I swear that this season seems to be much harder than the previous one. I seem to be able to run open world Torment 4 content without much issue, but Nightmare Dungeons seem a bit rippy at times. I am either immortal… or getting one-shot with little room between. There is an objective where you have to kill 50 Elites in Nightmare Dungeons without taking any deaths. Similarly there is a one that requires opening 25 of the roots from the events… in 15 minutes that is going to be hard as hell to get done. Everyone is out there spamming those things and you don’t get credit when someone else opens one. It is going to be rough getting through this one, and it might be something that I do once the season has died down a bit.

I am pretty sure Ace walked away with every unique but one, which is pretty decent considering I think that specific build requires a bunch of uniques. They did get what felt like 20 different copies of the ring that they needed, at least one of which was double ancestral. I got a wild quad ancestral necklace, which sadly I have no use for… but still cool to see. This is honestly what I wish Path of Exile 1 or 2 or even Last Epoch could be. All three of those have various punitive reasons why grouping up is occasionally butts. Diablo III and IV though… its all good and honestly better the more people you can pack into an event. The only negative would be the sheer amount of time and running back to a vendor that would be required to do four different players worth of summon materials. It would literally take an entire afternoon to cycle through a similar payload of four players worth of mats. It essentially took all night… around three hours maybe, to do all of our summons for six bosses.

I still feel like I am probably starting to wind down a bit. I want to start ratholing decent ancestral gear so that I can build an entire second set of gear and try blood wave. As much as I do not love the concept of a minion-less Necromancer, I still feel like I owe it to myself to try this season’s god build. Pure minions should get better at some point soon hopefully, because right now the Ring of Mendeln is not interacting correctly with several other legendary items, keeping the stack of multipliers from happening on minion damage. I will say it is kind of butts right now if you happen to die in any content, because there is no easy way to get back your minions unless you left a stack of corpses laying around. This is also a problem I have had in Last Epoch, except there you have to summon them all painstakingly one at a time. Path of Exile II really has the right idea by making your minions summon automatically. At a minimum in both Last Epoch and Diablo IV there should be a channeled button that will summon up all of your minions at once so that it isn’t something you can realistically use in combat, but it does allow you to get back to fighting shape easily.

I hope you are also finding some comfortable distraction from the bullshit that is happening in the real world. I am not blind to it, I just figure it is better for my mental health not to engage right now. Enough information is filtering through to know that shit is really bad. Please do not take my lack of engagement with it as a sign of not caring. I care about you and your safety, and if you need me I am only a message away on the plethora of platforms that I have an account on. I am still checking everything sporadically, but I am also denying them my undivided attention.

Season Seven Steam Subsiding

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Good Morning Folks! Since I did not do my normal weekend recap post yesterday, I figured this morning I would start out with a bit of a progress post on Diablo IV Season Seven. I have to admit… I am starting to run out of steam. I had a pretty great first week, but now I am reaching the point where I am not really as driven to keep moving forward. Minions Necromancer seems to have stalled out at Torment III, and I am struggling to push it up to something that feels halfway decent at Torment IV. I could of course swap to Blood Wave of one of the more powerful builds with zero minions… but I have been stubborn. Like I said last week… a Necromancer without Minions is basically just a shitty Mage.

Really the core problem that I am dealing with is not being able to get the drops that I need to progress the build. I am kitted out in full Ancestral gear, and honestly well rolled items at that… but the challenge that I am having is that I cannot get the Ancestral Uniques that I need for the build. I’ve got copies of the normal mode versions, and in theory I should probably try rearranging my gear in a way so that I could equip them and give that a shot to see how it feels. Largely across the board Ancestral drops feel like they are way less common than they were last league, and this feels bad. More than that it does not feel like I am having much success target farming the items. In theory Ace and I were talking about doing another round of boss summons this evening, and if I get lucky that would solve my problems.

I’ve completed the Battle Pass and unlocked all of this seasons cosmetics. I generally pay for the cheap version of the battle pass without any acceleration, because generally speaking the seasonal cosmetics are pretty freaking great. I am not entirely certain what I think about this armor set, but the weird raptor-horse thingy is pretty sweet. One thing that annoys me about the Battle Pass, is that since the cats are only available through the expansion… the seasonal tracks never seem to include any cosmetics for them. This is the problem with splitting features between expansion and core versions of the game, and seems like a bad design overall.

Where I am stalled out however is on the Season Journey. I’ve reached the final step called Destroyer, and every single objective requires Torment IV to complete. Since I cannot reliably run much of anything on Torment IV, that means I am pretty much hard locked. Then the final steps will require me to do copious farming while sitting on T4, and luck into a few edge cases like having two legendary shrines appear in a single Roothold. Maybe I am feeling a little more charitable to the streamers that I felt abandoned this season too soon, because honestly… I was just a bit slower reaching the point they must have on day one or two. I am not sure what is wrong with the season, but something feels off now that I am out of the super fun leveling phase.

I did however take down Lilith so that was a positive step forward. Last season I got hard carried by Ace on this fight, and this season I was able to one-shot it. This means I have my resplendent spark, so that if I can ever complete the seasons journey… I will be able to craft a mythic unique. Part of me is wondering if I should have gone with Spiritborn. Truth be told the core problem that I have with Diablo IV is how spammy it feels. Maybe I am just too used to one or two button builds in Path of Exile, but it is highly annoying that I need to spam six abilities every time they are off cool-down. I could always use the numlock trick, but that feels cheesy. Especially after getting used to the more combo based system of Path of Exile II… Diablo IV spammy combat feels odd.

I admit… I am not 100% certain how much longer I am going to keep poking at this. I should at least try a respec to something else before giving up the ghost. I am not sure what happened, but in the last two days the fun levels have diminished significantly. It was great so long as I felt like I was regularly knocking out objectives, but once I stalled out… it made me start to evaluate the type of combat that I was actually doing.

Two Years of Gamepad

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Gaz celebrating the second anniversary of Gamepad.club

Good Morning Folks! The weird thing about having a fixed schedule for your blog posts, is that you feel really weird changing it. As such I contemplated making this blog post over the weekend on Saturday, because the 25th was the second anniversary of Gamepad.club the Mastodon/Fediverse server that I assist with. That sounds rather clinical, but in truth Gamepad has become my home on the internet and the local feed and various other folks on the “Fedi” my extended family. Thankfully Gaz was better about posting at the appropriate time than I was. This little project continues to be one of the things that I am most proud of… which sounds weird considering that this was mostly Gaz’s doing and I have just helped out a bit behind the scenes along with Scopique and Aywren. In truth the last two years have been pretty damned smooth save for a few cases where we had to mass defederate some spammer sites.

non-public information blurred out as well as someone’s account that was labeled “secret” just in case.

I was actually the second account signed up on this server and joined January 25th, 2023 at 3:36 PM my timezone. This was roughly 20 minutes after Gaz created his own account. Scopique came along on the 29th which is I think the day we went public with the server. We did a few days of burn in before properly promoting it and opening the floodgates. We’ve not grown to be a massive server, but managed to stay comfortably in the 120-150 active accounts range during the entire time. There are a little over 300 total accounts on the server, but as is the case with many new platforms… not everyone finds their home right away. Truth be told the Fediverse is too “DIY” for a lot of folks who just want a direct drop in replacement for Twitter. That said it has also been the only place I have ever truly felt 100% comfortable to let down my guard and be my exceptionally strange self. If this Tales of the Aggronaut blog is my true home on the internet, then Gamepad is my Neighborhood… in that old timey way of having block parties, potluck dinners, and such.

I had great hopes for the Twitter migration, and that we would end up enthralling a bunch of folks converting them to the way of Mastodon. That never quite worked out for various reasons, but for me it was an easy change. I had been screwing around with the Fediverse since 2018, so that in 2022 when I felt like it was time to separate myself from Twitter… I knew precisely where I would end up. That said… I bounced around quite a bit between sites, and it was only really when Gaz asked me about helping him with Gamepad.club that I found a permanent home. Essentially he wanted to create a safe harbor for our friends that were leaving Twitter, and he learned a lot of lessons while hosting the ill fated MMORPG.social knowing we could create something better this time around. I’m happy to say that two years later we have this very stable community, and it is a freaking delight to participate in it.

All of that said… I’ve reached the point where I am no longer attempting to recruit people. I spent the last year I was active on Twitter effectively making nothing but “come to mastodon” posts with primers and information on how to get started. I am sure everyone got more than sick of that. Folks have largely ended up over on Bluesky, which is a perfectly cromulent social platform and was effectively a direct cut and paste for Twitter. It took me a long while to realize it, but no one was really looking for a more open platform other than me and others that were like minded. I wanted a social network that I had more control over, and that was not going to blow away in the wind at the whims of some Oligarch. I feel justified that the continued downfall of Twitter has proven my viewpoint to be correct. That said… most folks just want something painfully simple that has the majority of their friends on it… and do not really care who is running the platform so long as they don’t have to pay for it.

The thing that is super interesting however is for the folks who actually care about having a more open and stable platform… they are also willing to chip in to help support it. In Gaz’s post on the anniversary he indicated that we have 25 folks who are supporting the Gamepad patreon. Which I believe is bringing in enough funds to pay the bills and keep the server up and running. Additionally recently there has been a call for a Merch shop of some sort, and we talked a bit about that over the weekend. I would not be opposed to such nonsense pending we can find a platform that effectively runs itself and drop ships items on our behalf. That would potentially be another avenue for supporting the server when there are overages in the various cloud hosting bills. I support the server by helping to admin it, but also chip in $10 per month because you can’t keep the lights on with good intentions. I’ve been thrilled to see so many folks who are similarly civic minded and want to help make this site available for everyone.

I think the era of Twitter is finally coming to an end… years later that many of us who fled to Mastodon/Fediverse predicted. Unfortunately the platform of choice turned out to be Bluesky, which puts the continued fate of the platform in the hands of more would be tech Oligarchs. If the entire Fediverse went to shit, Gamepad could effectively disconnect itself and remain stable and viable. If Bluesky goes to shit… it is dragging everything down with it. All of that said the platform seems reasonable for the time being and that is definitely where the folks looking for a direct Twitter replacement ended up. I kind of use Bluesky as my “public facing” account and Gamepad as my private account. While I federate my Gamepad account with Bluesky, I prolifically use the “followers” visibility to keep posts I want more “private” from going across that wire.

I am hoping that two years is only the beginning for this platform. Thanks to Gaz for kicking off this project, and thanks to everyone who has joined over the years and been active. I love you dearly, and look forward to hanging out with you in local over the coming years. Mastodon/Fediverse sadly feels like insider tech, that only some folks are really going to “grok”… but those who do… seem hooked for life.