Last month, we released our 1.1 through 1.4 Roadmap and our plans for the upcoming 1.1 Pinnacle Boss. As always, collaboration with our community is a big factor in creating Last Epoch, and we use polls like this to help us make informed decisions. With that came the Poll discussing different ideas around the release of the new Pinnacle Boss and its timing. Well, thousands of you gave us feedback, and we are excited to share that information with you today.
Our decision regarding releasing the Pinnacle Boss is as follows:
- We will proceed with our suggested plan, which involves a short delay in releasing the Pinnacle Boss to Offline and Legacy environments.
- After a week has passed since the launch of 1.1, the Pinnacle Boss will be released to all environments, even if it has not been cleared within those environments. More precisely this will happen on Tuesday the 16th.
- If the Pinnacle Boss is defeated within the first week, it’ll be released to all environments within the next working day. If Pinnacle Boss is defeated on Friday the 12th, it’ll be released to everyone on Monday the 15th, for example.
- Clearing the boss in any 1.1 Cycle game mode will count. It is also not required to be defeated solo.
We examined different sets of data from the survey based on responses to different questions, but we are showing the full data in this post. Now, let's review the concepts, the poll results, and how this feedback shaped our future plans.
First, we asked players how they felt about the concept surrounding a specific part of patch content releasing to Legacy and Offline characters after a specific in-game event or timer. More specifically, we asked if the community liked the idea of releasing the upcoming Pinnacle Boss to Legacy and Offline with a delay instead of immediately, which encourages playing naturally through the content to experience the new Pinnacle Boss with new characters instead of immediately crushing it with existing Legacy or Offline characters. This type of release delay can also be used to make events or races much more interesting in the future, and it doesn’t make players feel the need to prepare characters in Legacy or Offline before new patches so that they can practice them before attempting them.
We were in favor of this concept internally; it was the main reason for the survey to begin with. However, it was the kind of decision that would benefit greatly from more communication directly with the community. Well, 69.9% thought that utilizing a format like this was something they agreed with, while only 14.8% said it was something they didn’t. This survey also sparked discussion in the community about potentially having “Cycle-only” content be restricted to Cycles for a shorter amount of time instead of the entire duration.
In question 2, we wanted to know if there was any demand for a maximum period before we release the Pinnacle Boss to the Legacy and Offline environments as a failsafe in the event that the Pinnacle Boss isn’t defeated. While we are confident that our community will totally smash our decided 1 week failsafe time, we wanted to ensure that there wasn’t a situation where the content was withheld unintentionally.
This question definitely saw a split and not one that we anticipated from the community. Mostly a position where the “No Time Limit” option garnered as much of the vote as it did. We expected a smaller minority of people who liked this idea, so 30.2% was much more than expected. We also wanted to clarify that these times would only take into account working days, as our 1.1 patch release date of July 9th was not yet public when the survey was put out to the community.
Internally we were quite heavily leaning towards one week. And with the data collected, it was close, but the results aligned with utilizing a one-week solution too.
For question 3, we were a bit more split on how long it should take after the first clear of the Pinnacle Boss in Cycle Online before we would also release it to Legacy and Offline modes, so it was naturally a question we wanted to get the community to provide their feedback on.
The results were very close, and we considered and examined how answers from questions 1 and 2 would relate to question 3 and how those votes would be aligned to help us make the final decision. Our decision came down to “The Next Working Day,” and we will start working on what a timeline for this would look like. It’s likely that we will choose something like 11am CST (Epoch Time, as we call it) the next working day. This means that if the Pinnacle Boss is cleared on a Friday, the next working day at EHG would be the following Monday.
In question 4, we asked, “Well, are there any specific game modes that would be preferable to consider it to be defeated to count for releasing it, or would any game mode be fine?”.
The response to this question was very unified, and was a clear winner even when the poll data was further narrowed down to only see the results of people who liked the suggested release delay of the Pinnacle Boss to begin with. We were also heavily leaning towards this option internally.
One thing to keep in mind however, is that in the future if we decide to utilize this for events or races surrounding new or old content like defeating endgame bosses, there might be restrictions such as needing to kill solo in an environment where you cannot trade with other people, or Hardcore.
As always, we greatly appreciate the community supporting the work of Last Epoch, and we look forward to seeing you in Eterra on July 9th for Cycle 1.1 - Harbingers of Ruin.
Thank You,
EHG Design Team
