Path of Exile Development Manifesto – Delve Costing Changes

A few days back, Grinding Gear Games released the 3.4.3 patch for their free-to-play action-RPG Path of Exile, aimed at improving the game’s recently introduced endless Delve mechanics. And if you’re interested in the developers’ reasoning behind these improvements, you should check out this development manifesto. Have a look:

Today we deployed 3.4.3, which contained some large changes to how Sulphite is acquired and how Delves are costed.

Our model (based on live gameplay data) showed that the changes in 3.4.3 would result in 25% more Delving for the average player who was playing at a given tier of maps.

The place where this breaks down is for players whose map base is insufficient for the depth they are playing at. We were assuming that players were playing at approximately the equivalent depth in the mine that corresponded to the same difficulty in the atlas.

Community feedback so far suggests that we were wrong about this.

Because of our use of an exponential curve, a difference in just a couple of tiers of maps has a very large difference in Sulphite gain, and this means that if you can’t sustain Tier 16 maps, you will have a vastly different amount of Sulphite than someone who can.

In order to address this, we are reducing the ramp of Sulphite during maps, and we are changing the curve from exponential to linear. This means, for example, that the difference between someone sustaining Tier 16 maps and someone sustaining Tier 12 is much, much lower than before.

The largest capacity upgrade is now 18,000 Sulphite (vs 30,000 before), to give you an example of the new scaling. If you have more than 18k Sulphite at the time the patch is deployed, it’ll be capped to 18k.

The best way to gain sulphite is still Tier 16 maps, but someone playing at lower tiers will still get a reasonable amount of Sulphite as well.

At the same time, we are still retaining the thing we wanted to actually fix, which is that maps are a lot more rewarding than non-maps for progressing in Delve.

These changes will be deployed today.

In addition to this change, we have a few other tweaks we are making.

Fixed a bug that affected parties with an even number of players, where Sulphite gain was based on one less party member than the party actually had.

This bug has been in since before 3.4.3, and didn’t affect everyone, but certainly didn’t help the situation. It’s fixed now.

Capped the maximum Sulphite costs of Delves at length 6.

These relatively rare long Delves could sometimes require more Sulphite than your overall capacity.

Reduced the Sulphite cost of longer Delves (starting at length 2) slightly, with a larger discount for longer lengths. At length 6, the discount is 25%.

Longer Delves already have better rewards than shorter ones, and are now discounted to incentivise players further for choosing them.

Provided slightly more Sulphite bonus for Map Item Quantity.

This is only a small change, but after this update, map item quantity will have more effect on Sulphite gain (more noticeable in higher maps).