vilverin

I'd agree with that. Pacing of combat does feel better overall, but it's still a little bit clunky. I don't really like to use the combat slider to speed things up, because that speeds up animations as well, meaning that everything look like a timelapse video. Therefore, I'd still prefer the default combat pacing to be a little quicker than it currently is, especially for physical damage classes. I will admit that this might change as you get better gear (with recovery & action speed benefits) and skills in the final game. Ship combat does feel better, but as others have noted as well, I mostly end up trying to get into a good shooting position in the very beginning and then just cycle through the same actions every turn, which seems a little boring. It also means that if my ship and the enemy ship are equally well equipped and staffed, the combat outcome mostly appears to depend on who gets more luck with the RNG. Otherwise, definitely excited to see all the improvements. This is looking very good already!

The same happened to me with a barbarian/druid. Just a floating head, no body. It's hard to reproduce, because it just happened at some point (two hours into the game, I'd say), and after that, it stays that way, even upon reloading. I have actually managed to stack up different shapeshifting forms and their bonuses this way (since my druid is a Shifter subclass and can shift into different forms - and once the bug occurred, previous forms don't go away). When I hover over the small icons next to my barbarian/druid's character portrait, the shapeshifting modes show a negative time count, becoming more and more negative over time.

The beta system is sweet. I've been very impressed by your responsiveness to bug reports already, and this will likely make it even better. Keep it up!

And I guess you and only you are the objective judge with respect to what counts as a relevant reason to be offended, and what does not? For every single person in the world, I guess? I would consider that as being quite delusional...

No serious statistician will claim that statistics are objective... A whole lot of subjectivity goes into the problem framing, choosing the data to be analyzed, choosing the statistical models, choosing the quality criteria of the assessment, and so on. Numbers are often used to back otherwise weak arguments. "Lies, damned lies, and statistics"...

Well criticism is always subjective, and if those who are not having fun with the game voice their concerns, it's an opportunity for Obsidian to improve. I'm fully with you on that one... but well, welcome to the internet. Not much you can do

As long as the share of backers vs. non-backers isn't significantly different on GOG, the numbers don't change at all. One of the bigger assumptions might be that the achievement probably needs the game to be started at least once (I didn't even notice it myself but I'm pretty sure that's how Steam achievements work). So if there's a significant proportion of backers who have never even installed and run the game, the estimate might be way too high. I mean I'm no expert but almost half a million copies (let's wait for the first Steam/GOG sale) does sound like a lot for this kind of a game to me. You're absolutely right of course, if we try to estimate the total number of sales (steam plus GOG), the numbers wouldn't change much. And your point about achievements is a good one. FYI, steamspy provides some ownership estimates (but I have not idea how good they are). They are lower than the 77+380k suggested here, but they obviously don't include GOG at all.

That is an extremely good point, I think most people underestimate this factor...

Almost every single review I saw on PoE applauded it for being surprisingly bug-free. While quite a few people encountered severe bugs, I don't think the support forum threads have as high of an impact on sales as reviews do... You make it sound as if PoE wasn't selling well or living up to its expectations in terms of sales. I don't see why that would be the case (at least Paradox definitely doesn't think so)

If i remember correctly D:OS was released during the summer holidays and there was basically no competition, so total sales might be a better comparison. Also like you said, several AAA titles are currently released/about to be released: GTA5, Bloodbourne, The Witcher 3 are just the ones on my personal list. Exactly. Sales figures will be comparable after a couple of months... But D:OS may also just have a larger audience (among the gamers who don't regularly play cRPGs), even though PoE's overall "quality" is arguably higher.

This question at least we can get some estimate on. According to the Steam achievements, 16.8% of people who own the game are backers. This means that with 77,000 backers, about 380,000 additional copies have been sold as preorders or at full price. Now how much that is in actual cash for the devs is more difficult to say because of the number of editions and because I have no clue what share Obsidian sees but since the currency in the gaming industry seems to be "copies sold" anyway, who cares? That's a neat way to estimate the sales on Steam! Although some backers will have redeemed their key on GOG. On the other hand, some backers got more than one key (77'000 backers is not 77'000 keys), so these two things may balance each other out. And of course, many non-backers have bought the game on GOG (the three editions of PoE have occupied the Top 5 on GOG for weeks now). But I think that Obsidian itself will care more about the amount of money they make (for putting it into future projects) than "copies sold". A Paradox representative mentioned somewhere in an interview that Paradox's share of revenue is significantly smaller than usual in the case of PoE (because they didn't fund the game the way that publishers usually do), so I think Obsidian gets a fairly decent chunk out of it.

The notion that "Obsidian doesn't care" is indeed delusional. In fact, the whole "poem issue" is just another piece of evidence that Obsidian does care about their customers. They cared too much about the feedback of a certain group of people in this case - and they may not have reacted the way some people wanted them to - but no one in their right mind can claim that they don't care. This is also why it aggravates me that people see this as censorship. Go read up on what censorship means. People giving feedback (even when expressed in a very egotistical, ridiculous manner) on content that leads to a voluntary change in the content with full consent by the content creator is not censorship. Not at all. It's a freaking regular feedback mechanism.

The numbers seem to come from SteamSpy. I'm not sure that they are reliable; for instance, the ownership over time graph claims that ownership of PoE has decreased in the last 4 days (even though it can't decrease, and PoE has continuously been in the top 3 games sold). I know they provide confidence intervals, but these seem too small...

That's very interesting! Where do you get these numbers from? Do you know if they include the sales of the boxed/DVD version (that are then activated through steam, but not sold through steam?) As others have pointed out, these numbers are really quite high, considering it probably doesn't include backer sales, GOG sales, etc, and we're only 1 week in. I'm really glad it's doing so well

The most ridiculous thing is the blatant irony in this: you people are fighting something with the very same weapons that you so vigorously oppose. It's funny how you can hardly distinguish between the twitter posts of the people who originally got upset, and the post made by some of the people here that are so upset by the update. The exact same egotistical, self-righteous and ignorant style. How about we all go back to playing the game that we've all been awaiting for 2.5 (or, actually, 15) years?

+1 to both of you. Glad to see some points that are not fueled by anger and rage around this "issue". Too bad you're the minority ;-)

And how exactly is this a more reasonable reaction than the one of the people that were offended by the original poem? It's precisely the same kind of reactionist BS. Some people... Also, the poem was only altered, not removed (see C2B's post), and it's still pretty funny...

You're not alone, I feel the same. I don't understand why people are so obsessed with discussing balancing changes as if it was a MOBA. Don't forget to have fun playing the game, guys...

Let me join the others in saying that you shouldn't let them get you guys down! I'm sure that many of us highly appreciate the fact that you are working very hard on this, and understand that this is an extremely complex piece of software where you can't just randomly rush out fixes before testing them thoroughly. But those who shout the loudest are those that you'll hear - it's just "sampling bias" Very impressive patch notes, by the way!