Huge thanks to Jonathan and Hrishi for joining us on a free chat live on Twitch. Enjoy!

Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with them on certain topics, you gotta give it to GGG for doing these kinds of interviews. The back and forth communication between devs and players is much appreciated in the current gaming landscape.

For those looking for the trade news: The discussion of trade begins at 1:48:26

Everytime GGG does an interview it's like a masterclass in game design. They're the only designers I see where I'm thinking "these guys know way better than me what to do with the game I love"

I really like the way Jonathan talks about things. He's very intelligent, prepared and understands the impact of being direct.

Early Respec solution. Have an NPC named Mizaran that travels with you to each act who offers empathy and cryptic advice. After you complete an act, you can take a repeatable quest at that Act hub to clear out a zone. Upon quest turn in, Mizaran unspecs your passive tree. Towards the end of the campaign, the player's actions directly lead to Mizaran's death, removing him from all hubs. Requiring the player to rely on Orbs or Regret going forward.

Late to the party but this is my favourite PoE2 interview so far. Great prep and awesome back and forths!

I could listen to Chris and Jonathan talk about their development philosophy for hours. Most dev interviews end up being a bunch of fan favor promises and fluff. With these guys it's always "This is why we do it and it this is the intended outcome, abrasion and all."

Ziz couldn't stop smiling when Jonathan started talking about instant buyouts. Nor couldn't I.

You can definitely tell that hrisihi came from a player background in how he talks about mechanics. I really think these two are a fantastic representation of the company to talk to the community and people really appreciate their attitudes and input.

One of the best things about these os hearing Jonathan's thought process and reasoning for things as opposed to other companies where you get a canned corporate response.

I'm SOOOO glad they're reworking trade. Trade and Performance are the two most important issues with PoE 1. I really hope they that they fix trade in PoE 1 as well. I understand beta-ing the changes in PoE 2 first, but it's super important. Thanks Ziz, for a great interview. Thanks Jonathan and Hrishi for taking the time.

I'm so glad we have Jonathan and the rest of the team, even if what they're doing here is directly advertising the game being so transparent with how they're planning for the game to function is sick

I watched this live and I think closing chat and focusing on your own set of questions and follow ups was a great idea. This interview was well orgenized and cohesive and you even got some insane information out of them unintentionally. Thank you and I look forward to the next one.

Thanks for doing this @Zizaran , Jonathan and Hrishi! Last Epoch is shaking up the ARPG scene without even launching. TFT is getting adressed by GGG. 2024 is a great year for ARPG fans (including D4 too).

You know you've been playing PoE for a long time when Jonathans hair used to be black and Ziz's blue. Time flies.

Man I got to give it to you Zizaran. I love the way you choose to conduct yourself in this interview and ask the things you want to know, and be able to follow-up on things and get into more fundamentals of why/how things are or what they envision it to be. this is the only interview so far that I been able to follow from beginning till end, and stay engaged/interested. So well done.

The PoE2 trading changes sound insane. It's probably going to have a massive impact on how the endgame is going to feel compared to PoE1. Really interested to see how it plays out.

Such a great interview! Ziz your style of engaging with questions and the way you elaborate on them is top notch. I've seen a few times elsewhere that John or someone else may misinterpret a question, but you do an excellent job being direct and your examples leave no room for error or misunderstanding. So glad we have such well spoken people in our community!

Huge thanks to Johnathan, Hrishi and Ziz for this awesome Interview! So hyped for PoE2.

i think it would be good to have more respec points awarded for side missions during the campaign so newer players can unbrick their builds easier and experienced players can spec into speed to get through the campaign faster and then respec once its done

Bloody hell it's so satisfying listening to a dev talk that loves their game and understands game development to this depth. Can't wait to try PoE2

This was my favorite of the recent interviews, great job guys!

Only 26 minutes in, but want to leave a comment before I forget. This interview is amazing so far. Really good questions and Jonathan and Hrishi come off great. tbh, whether it's Chris, Mark, Rory, Jonathan, Hrishi, or anyone else, I've never really seen GGG devs not come off well in their interviews. You can always see the passion and the genuine interest in their product. Thanks to everyone who made this happen!

The thoughts required to make games at this level is insane. Every decision can have such a huge impact on so many other situations/aspects of the game.

nice to hear about the trading changes here. Something that could be cool too is that higher tier maps reward more gold (same for harder bosses) so you dont feel your progress is being slowed down when you reach more end game and have more things to buy

Hey Ziz, thank you for all the work you do for the community. It is much appreciated. My excitement for POE 2 just doubled just watching this video.

This was an amazing interview. Thanks for asking great questions and follow ups Ziz! GGG is doing a great job with engaging with the community and discussing the finer details openly.

been waiting for this interview for days! finally

Thank you for the fantastic interview, which was filled with information :). It was genuinely evident how passionate Jonathan was throughout these discussions. While likely unintended, I noticed multiple instances where Jonathan seemed to inadvertently interrupt Hrishi. Just something I observed!

Another solution for respecing early characters is a separate quest chain, that only gives major bonus once, say, skill point + 2 respecs, but every time it's completed after gives minor respec reward (or progressive respec reward to rebuild everything). So it a newbie borked his build, he can go farm the quest line - which should be faster than redoing the campaign. It's partially works this way now with pros always skipping respec side quests when they are leveling

Amazing interview! Excellent follow ups, also very excited about the fixes to trading.

"Cost too much? Yeah... but the feel you get!" Jonathan is a great game dev

Thank you Ziz, thank you Jonathan and Hrishi for offering so much insight into the vision of the game, where its headed, and WHY. I am happy about a lot of things ive heard so far, excited to keep watching. PoE seems like its heading in a good direction. a lot of gripes i have with it in its current iteration, are being adressed. thats wonderful :) great game, happy to keep playing it 55:00 To that discussion, this is how I would fix it: Add enough positive mods, to the point where it doesnt take 3-5 rolls (minimum) to get a decent mod. In an optimal world, its a 50/50 whether i gotta "chaos" my map once, to make it not dreadfully bad. and it should average out to be better than the previously bad map. To put some abitrary numbers behind it or example: lets say maps are judged on a % based number, how good they are. juice and all that. when your maps drop, they usually will be (by nature of chance) around 50% juicy map. but sometimes, a map drops, and is just poorly rolled, like 20-30% juicy (idk 1 or 2 positive mods.) but then you slam a chaos, it rolls more positive mods (idk 2-3 total. and then the negative 3-4mods along it). Now you have your 50% juicy map, or maybe if u got lucky, and hit 4 positive map mods. 70% juicy map. now just add scarabs, chisel all that jazz. and you have your 100% juiced map. The amount of rolls is ofc subjective, but I am just thinking, this would be a good solution perhaps. 1:55:00 OKAY! Nice :) I like the conclusion, and reaction. Very reasonable approach to why and how they wanna fix the economy problems that come with instant buyout

Excelent interview. Jonathan and Hrishi are a joy to listen to. Your work preparing the questions and follow up really shows as well. I think it was a great idea not reading chat as well, so you focus on the interview and having a conversation instead of trying to read chat while half listening to the answers.

Great interview. Alot of very nice information

In HC the visual clarity is definitely more of a concern, but in SC I usually don't care. As long as whatever pinnacle content has decent clarity that's all I ask.

It is very clear that Jonathan keeps thinking about POE after work hours. I really appreciate his openness to explaining his thought process about these concepts and not just giving a scripted answer. More devs need to be this accessible to their playerbase. It makes the players feel much more connected to the game when their concerns are acknowledged, even if they aren't immediately addressed. GGG's actual love of games gets me excited to sink another 4k hours into their work.

GGG is a shining example of communication with player base. Great interview/Q&A, respectful, insightful. And also great job Ziz for being able to respectfully present your perspective as a player, some cool ideas. Absolute pleasure to watch and gives me a lot of hope for POE2.

Great questions Ziz! When they are talking about respecing around 32:40, It might be too much extra work for them to do, but I wonder if they have ever thought about a milestone system where it encourages the thematic class type choice they are talking about, and lets you free respec each cluster of nodes if you don't like them instead of each individual node. Such as, at the moment it already has branching choices at the start between life vs damage or armor vs mana etc at the start, and later fire vs cold damage etc. So the way it could work is, once you make the choice, say life, you can freely respec points resetting it back to zero (only about 3-7 points at a time), in order to go back to the other path for damage instead if you think you have made a bad choice and do no damage. For another example, say you're playing a melee class, and have a branching choice between bleed vs impale, you can pick up all the bleed nodes in that section (like up to ~7), just to try them out as you level, but if you're not liking the style of bleed, instead of making an entirely new level 40+ character because you don't have 10 regrets yet, you can free respec all the bleed nodes back to zero, and put them into impale to try that instead, then if you don't like impale, reset them and go with something else, effectively like a free trial on each cluster of nodes until you have tested them out. Once you start going beyond the latest chosen nodes such as bleed, it locks the previous area of the tree, and you need to pay the normal regret orb cost to respec that area of the tree. Effectively making each regret orb ~5 times stronger, by unlocking entire clusters at a time, then they can make fewer of them drop making them more valuable to the player, and you won't need hundreds of them to respec at max level, and would be much less likely to use them like this because you could have tried all the other paths along the way and would be much more confident in your build. Hope that makes sense, wonder if this would work better or not, what do you think?

Thanks for this AMAZING interview. I really enjoyed it.

LOVE the trade changes coming. Preventing botting and flippers by forcing them to acquire gold is genius! (I hope that gold is tied to time spent playing and not scalable by quantity/rarity gear.)

So much respect to GGG for both recognizing when their position needs to change, and also taking the time to find solutions that can solve the problem identified while keeping their principles.

Great question and suggestion on the shadow nodes.

Next patch Respeccing a point now cost 1 orb of regret per allocated point. THANKS ZIZ!

HOPEFULLY! they implement the auction house wherein you can still buy from people who are already offline. This will solve the current market of POE1 being bad/dead when nearing league end.

Love how dedicated and thoughtful they are about everything that goes into the game. Looking forward to poe2 so much

Really great interview! Good for POE players, but also for game developers in general. It was really informative on the nuances you need to keep in mind while iterating on old, and developing new systems. It was a masterclass in how a company should communicate with the community of your game.

im sold on PoE 2 already with the instant buy-out

Juicy new trade system discussion is at 1:51:35

I've never played PoE. Despite knowing almost none of the jargon, I found this interview/conversation informative and entertaining. It's interesting to hear developer responses to direct feedback and their thought processes. It's also quite clear that the devs actively keep in touch with community concerns by discussing them internally to reach a resolution - it's nice to see that transparency. Hope you continue these talks.

About Pause, if Pause would have cooldown before it's applied it would solve all issues with abuse-ability. Example: Press Pause, Pause in 3-2-1 and Pause is applied, if anyone did play Warframe in missions (Defence and other on wave 5 when you vote, or more than 1 Void Relic in any Relic hunts), there wouldn't need for "Blackout" solutions and so on.

"Regret orbs droprate is now 1/1000 of what is was before", thanks Ziz! x'D

Real improvements to trading? Well. That's a game-changer. That might actually get me playing again, trade was always by far the most hated thing for me. Good going GGG!

Took me a few days to get through it all, but great interview. I was totally unprepared for the trade news when it hit; awesome!

Really nice interview. I would add for trading: -gold cost for posting/ buyinh stuff. -The currency you get for a sale would go to a remove only special tab to avoid problems -Let people buy fe standart stuff if the seller is playing on league -Just change /trade to have a buy button and gold fee instead of whisper and a message if the item was already sold or something. -You could experiment with making it like mandatory to be online to sell .... Keep up the good work ! 😊

Let's go dude 🎉

Ziz trying sooo hard to not just start screaming of excitement

Haven't played PoE in a while, but these GGG developer interviews are so interesting to watch/listen. It must be like people have said "They dont just design the game they play it", so they talk about something they like and I really enjoy it :)

loved it, good questions and follow-ups!

I'm glad to see that the trade system in Last Epoch is already impacting his competitors, mainly GGG. The gold fee for trading, and not being able to trade gold, only being able to farm gold, is effectively Favor in Last Epoch, which you have to spend in order to buy an item in addition to the item's cost in gold.

The buyout thing, is a dream come TRUE for me as a player.

One problem with immunities/very high resists that wasn't mentioned is the interaction with group play. A solo player would have to degrade their build to enable focus on multiple damage types while group players could focus on just one damage type as long as their group has a variety of damage types.

Great interview, well done Ziz! :D

Just watched the whole Video good Job on the Interview

The idea of a gold fee for an auction-house instant buyout transaction is f***ing genius. It gives the players what they want while limiting trading done by bots who never leave the hideout.

1:51:35 Thank you ziz for highlight this! finaly we got little light about trading in poe.

As for respecing, from a poe 1 perspective tying low cost or free respect to kitava's curse seems like a good option

Chris Wilson will always be a legend but I'm really liking Jonathan as a game lead.

Need to say it, those trades advances are mostly thx to Las Epoch approach to trade/ssf 1:51:52

I love the stuff that keeps coming out of these interviews! Thanks a lot @zizaran for doing another one with these lovely devs. Poe2 will be the game of the century :)

I really like getting rewards from other activities in different things. I don't like certain content so for ssf having a chance to get say blight pols elsewhere is nice. That said having a way to spec into it would be nice where it is still a lower chance then speccing out for a particular league mechanic

Both Jonathan and Hrishi will go down in history as truly legendary game devs for their insanely intelligent and candid takes. It’s such an amazing thing to watch these guys talk about this awesome game.

For the respec of points, I would say to have x amount of "level regrets" and you lose 1 or 2 of those per level up. That way, the more you level up or you respec the less you have. And at level 80 or so the number gets to 0 or 10 normally.

I would do what they are doing in last epoch with the whole SSF thing. I only really play poe with 1 friend and i would love to be able to play a "BroSF" mode where those chase uniques are more common and things actually drop and are farmable without minmaxing meta scarabs and juice. That would be such an amazing system.

Awesome interview! The trade news is very exciting, although I will miss visiting other player's hideouts. I was wondering if maybe there would be an option to trade the old fashioned way and avoid the fee, but that actually makes it harder for the seller too, so it probably wouldn't work.

damn this title got me hyped

Finally they acknowledged about TFT's situation. Hopefully we get an auction house!!

1:15:00 what I would like to see is when you identify an item for each affix allowed on the item a choice between 2 of the available mods in the pool roll. Then you select this or that, next affix this or that, until each affix is done. Like a lotting mini game when you identify. That would make drops and identifying have that "oh boy!" aspect. Then for items with fixed mods those wouldn't obviously change.

Thanks Ziz. So glad the guys at GGG are always so welcoming to open communication between players and developers. It shows me that they are passionate about the game they've created and that player opinion is important to them. Not many companies willing to be that transparent *COUGH BLIZZARD COUGH*

Jonathan saying that regardless of price he feels that creating items with the PoE community would be worth it should tell you all you need to know about GGG. They actually care about the game they create.

Simple solution: free respec on eternal/persistent server, no/limited respec on leagues.

Poe is a passion project for these developers. So I will always support them however I can. Amazing creators who care greatly for community satisfaction it’s amazing to see in the current climate

as a lore guy, I agree with GGG on respec. I create a character and it's an adventure, I'm already experimenting. If I fail, it breaks the immersion when I can just respec and change my character. it's like a MIB flash pen. I would like NPC who are thematic and we can see them play and see their passive priority. example is some marauder who focused on melee while another is on Ignite. is explains passives through the NPC playing/killing mobs. think of like D2 LOD and the barbs fighting outside Oriath gate. It makes the world feel alive and explain mechanics. Then make a bunch of witches that are ele, minions, chaos dmg, etc with all ascendencies with a mechanic.

Respec solution. when you level up you get a skill point and 1 respec point. That way players can make changes as they grow. They can have multiple minor respecs and or one full respec per character Maybe every other level or even until a certain level.

1:55:00 They managed to reinvent the Vanilla WoW auction house after more than a decade. Amazing.

Great in depth interview. Thanks to Ziz and GGG! My only big issue still revolves around respecs that keep me from returning season after season. In all of the games I have played I love build tools and min maxing. It's as much a fun part of the game as the game itself. But using Path of Building is not the same as trying something on live to see the real results and when you hit the brick wall, that will happen especialy as you learn, you want the ability to execute new options without punishment. The season should be about learning and adapting, not following a guide or preplanning every step for the next few months. Painful respecs is the main reason I rage quit for the season and likely pass on the next season until I forget how angry I got. It ends my engagement with the season. Just think of all of the players you can engage and keep engaged by making free tweaks and changes to the build. Unfortunately GGG seemed more interested in "I don't want people respecing on the fly" and stopping that behavior of the top tier, punishing the many. Even if people would engage in that behavior, it still rewards those players for knowing the game inside and out, and isn't that one of the things that really drives POE in the first place: POE knowledge is POE power, play learn new info, build and get better results....without suffering because this a game after all not a job, for most of us. Ziz, keep up the good work and thanks for bringing up this topic in your interview!

This was extremely good news. I love the transperency the GGG team has always had with the players. Thank you Ziz for asking amazing questions.

"I think having some skills you cant see bothers me a lot" .... **gestures wildly at the entirity of POE 1 as it stands**

to the boss diffcard problem , just make the boss ONLY drop the divcard...and that beeing the only way to get that item ...taht also averages out the rng a bit ...also makes it easier to give a boost to selffarmed encoutners vs traded encounters....AND give all globaldroptiems that are buildenabling a least one divcard that can be aquired...eg ebonytower.....

Thanks for the solid interview. Great questions! You can tell they are really passionate about POE2 and I think that will show in the quality of the game. Looking forward to it!

Great video! Looks like Jonathan holds his mic like he’s holding a beer lol

Can Jonathan ever let his colleagues finish a sentence? It becomes really obvious the more interviews i watch. Why even have a second person with him. I know he has a lot of interesting things to say but please we want to hear from everyone :)

Hands down Ziz's interview with devs feels the best out of the ones out there

How cool is that! They did really take their time!

For passive skill resets and new players, perhaps a good middle ground would be for a fresh accounts first character each passive skill reset quest instead rewards something like double the reset points. This would allow for more trial and error for the new players, however could be misleading with future builds where they might expect the same amount of reset points in a playthrough, but a disclaimer when creating your first character could circumvent that.

Jenebu still not banned after harassing + doxing lmao

Going to drop poe 1 for poe 2 just for the AH, if not implemented on poe1

I like how in tune these guys are with the community and the overall meta, things are looking promising for PoE2

i swear this 2 hours felt like 10 mins! nice interview