Grinding Gear Games CEO Addresses Concerns About Changes Coming To Path Of Exile Expedition
Following the release of the Grinding Gear Games CEO Chris Wilson has penned a rather lengthy letter to the community on Reddit to address player complaints.
“There has been speculation that I have personally been driving the balance changes to match my original vision for Path of Exile,” he said. “There is a little truth to this, in that I want to restore areas of the game that were important but have been eroded, but almost every area of specific balance work is the product of a large team of designers working together for a long time to come up with solutions to problems we want to address.”
“We try to be very cautious and to care about your experience with Path of Exile,” he added. “Unfortunately, we've been hitting a breaking point with power creep recently and really need to address it. [. . .] The changes we are making in Expedition are a carefully-considered set that sound daunting but probably have less overall impact on the way you will play the game than you suspect they may. These changes really open up possibilities for the future and put us in a good position for working towards the release of Path of Exile 2.”
Wilson continues to explain the reasons for a few controversial changes, including the increased mana cost for several gems and the removal of the Cold DOT stat from the Hypothermia gem as well as accusations that the studio makes balance tweaks based on incorrect data from the community-written wiki.
“We don't use the wiki for doing balance work. What happened in this case was a mistake while preparing the patch notes.”
“The person preparing the patch notes often copy/pastes the formatting for skill stat descriptions from the wiki and then adjusts the values to the correct ones based on the skill's balance history,” Wilson explained. “Unfortunately, with over a thousand distinct patch notes to write, many of which only getting final values in the last few days, mistakes were made and a few values were left unmodified and incorrect.”
“With over a hundred developers and thousands of changes going into each expansion, communicating everything clearly is a challenge,” he itted. “We will continue to improve this process and welcome any about how we can make changes to Path of Exile in a way that is better understood and less upsetting to players. [. . .] In the meantime, I'm going to get back to playtesting Expedition. See you on Friday!”
Path of Exile: Expedition launches on July 23 on PC and Mac. Servers are scheduled to go offline for maintenance at 10am PDT and are expected to be back up by 1pm PDT on the same day.
