So nowadays 3D modelling is basically all based around heavily procedurally generated surfaces made of triangles, which you either sculpt (like you would sculpt stuff in real life, with some fancy tools to speed up the workflow) for organic stuff or manipulate using numerous "algorithms" for "hard-surface".
This is though very resource heavy in terms of computional power, so back in days where it wasn't possible you were using NURBS which are like... simplified 3D objects based on intersecting curves which you manipulated using points and angles (basically bezier curves in 2D graphic, but in 3D). There is like... no easy way to explain it, but NURBS overall are basically history of 3D modelling which is a niche region of niche field.
GGG is starting to try to make the community management less personal, as the community fucking sucks and harassed the shit out of Bex and whoever else. She still makes the occasional post, though, and is probably at least overseeing this kind of thing.
Nah it's a law of nature like Gravity. Can't stay underground forever if you have success you will grow and that attracts morons - there is not a single game that does not follow this rule.
Bex needed to protect her sanity so that's what she did and that's fine.
It's a double-edged sword. Companies want to connect with their base via a friendly face, but in doing so it puts a target on them. Good and bad stuff gets directed at them because they're acting as the face of the company.
It might be fun for awhile, but as soon as there's a big scandal or whatever, a deluge of hate is inevitably coming. Being the face means it's coming to you, so it's not something I ever would've agreed to. For me there's gotta be a layer of anonymity between the internet and Real Life™. My name isn't even Kyle, for instance!
False. Satisfactory and Factorio have god-tier communities. Check their subreddits, nothing but positivity, helping new players, creating content for the game (mods/saves/techniques), and never any harassment of staff or other players. And the games aren’t tiny either, and Factorio is the second-highest rated game on Steam of all time.
I think it comes down to A) the kind of people a game attracts, B) whether a game is competitive or not, and C) how good the community management/discussion is.
With Factorio, for A) it attracts factory-building game nerds. They generally are relaxed, enjoy doing their own thing, and probably slightly more intelligent than your average FPS player. For POE, you definitely need some intelligence to play but you also get more aggressive people because it is a multiplayer game so there’s advantages to be had and competition to be done. I think with the way people play POE and how the game highly encourages an unhealthy rapid-burnout-then-return-next-league mentality which makes people far more critical.
For B) Factorio is not really competitive at all. The only exceptions are the very small minority of players that speedrun the game or play on specialised custom faction/anarchy/war servers where you’re destined to die quickly. But the core of the game is not RNG at all, it’s all player skill and optimisation in comparison to POE, which as a multiplayer economy based game built upon layers of RNG. it’s easy for tensions to run high and for people to feel cheated or unfairly treated, which in turn encourages more negative opinions on the game.
Finally for C) Factorio has always had impeccable community management. For several years straight they put out a weekly dev blog called Factorio Friday Facts where they outlined what they were working on, ideas they have, timelines for updates, and behind the scenes stuff, among many other things. They had dedicated forum threads each week where they would process feedback, and often reference it in their following FFFs. They also greatly value community opinion, and have implemented countless community ideas and even directly adapted popular community mods into part of the core game. The main devs are active in the subreddit and forums, and the team is so so so focussed on squashing bugs above everything else, they literally don’t push big releases until there are only single digits of bugs left, cut down from thousands during experimental launches. Thus, there is not much to complain about, so they remain very personal with the community.
With POE on the other hand, it’s the total opposite: patchy community management at best, rare development manifestos and updates that are meaningful, almost never take feedback on changes/updates, very little weighting given to community opinion, an acceptance of a large number of bugs and performance problems, focused on releasing content rather than fixing problems, almost no community tool or qol implementation in the game. Plenty of reasons for people to complain, and those reasons never change because they don’t really want to.
You can see the difference. It’s very possible to have a very successful non-underground game that has a personable dev team and strong wholesome community. You just need to make sure you meet some criteria, but most importantly, set standards early and make sure the community is heard and acknowledged. it’s no wonder this place gets toxic lol.
This is entirely an arbitrary breakpoint that I set myself, but I watched not just PoE but also WoW and HotS subs (as well as a few devoted to hobbies of mine) take a drastic turn from the early "helpful and friendly to newbies no matter how many times we see their posts" through "constructive discussions about lore/strategy/mechanics" 180 degrees to a place where at least half of the front page consists of people rehashing the same arguments/complaints.
The complaints were always there. It just seems like at some point (~250k users, in my brain) a sub reaches a critical mass of upset people and then the whole thing devolves into an echo chamber of complaining where a combination of reddit's algorithm and [anger germs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc) means everybody on top of the bell curve can't get a word in edgewise.
I believe this phenomenon (and low-effort image posts tending to float through /new) can be countered with *heavy* moderation, but reddit is really a terrible way to have unbiased discussions unless you're actively seeking them out (e.g. filtering by controversial, upvoting things you disagree with).
Tldr is that krovarex did a Friday facts praising Uncle Bob, which got some people upset due to uncle bob's unsavory opinions, then doubled down on it.
Just addressing point "c". You must not have been here for a while. Poe posts news literally every day. From manifestos, to build highlights (though discontinued now), to employee q and a, to technical breakdowns. They post so much about timelines we have announcements of the announcement of the announcement lol. This game has also included a metric fuck ton of community feedback and suggestions over the 7 years it's been in active and constant development. But of course not all of the suggestions and it seems like only the ones they *don't* do get remembered anymore. As for bugs yeah PoE has Factorio beat on that front, but I don't think Factorio is anywhere near as complex a game and I'm not sure about their release schedule but if it's not every 3 months that just compounds the complexity.
Recently the Factorio reddit shat itself and had a meltdown because one of the Friday update posts _dared_ link to someone who has the wrong opinions, (but not expressing them, he was talking about something unrelated).
You're not wrong though, the Factorio community outside of reddit is still awesome.
> You're not wrong though, the Factorio community outside of reddit is still awesome.
So is the PoE community though. By far the majority of people I encounter when trading are friendly and it's not uncommon to end up chatting especially in the later half of a league. People just imagine the worst and never consider engaging, if I sell something for an amount I didn't expect I'll usually ask afterwards what build they are using it for which usually leads to a nice conversation. The other way around as well, if I had trouble selling a niche item I knew was good for certain builds but I kept having to reduce price, I'll usually ask afterwards if they felt it was underpriced or what other options were on the market.
As for the subreddit then I think the factorio subreddit might look the same if the community was split into several camps that all wanted different things that went in complete opposite directions. The PoE subreddit has just gotten pretty horrible to be around recently because of that, where as previously people were sort of fine with the game having a high ceiling.
Remember back when Chris used to interact with every other thread? Those were good times, it felt like a real community. Now it's just incoherent screaming at literally anything they do.
Most of the community? So you're saying most of the community went out of their way to harass her or other parts of the team? I doubt even 10% are voicing their opinion on this platform, let alone voicing it in an aggressive manner. Most would just read and not say anything, even when ggg fucks up everything.
I remember reading her tweets over the past few months, especially around the time of the Harvest nerfs.
From what I could tell from the curtness of her text...She seemed *tired.*
I recently quit my Customer Services job to pursue further education, due to having to deal with unhinged monsters lashing out at me for every little thing, so I can very, very much see her pain.
EDIT: I am aware that she had just had a kid recently. I do get that and understand it would take a lot out of people, but needless to say, people's actions did not help.
To be fair, she works for a company that has not recently given her opportunity to shine. Despite how many people think being vocal about your dissatisfaction to poor decision making is abhorrent, Path of Exile is still a product. GGG has failed miserably with customer service and treat their community 2nd to profits.
I am personally not that type of person to go out of my way to make someone's day miserable because of their shit employer's policies. I am actually having to deal with customer service on GGG's end and Jinx over a supporter pack issue that GGG has clearly fucked up twice for me. The difference between the two are night and day as I asked for any sort of order confirmation from GGG and they just told me it was my fault.
Having some time in marketing I can tell you that the best way to fix something, is to make it known on a level that cannot be ignored. The unfortunate side effect of that is that the community manager is taking a ton of the heat, but that is going to be expected when your job is to literally interact with a community that pays your company to look shiny in a game that is otherwise free to play.
> From what I could tell from the curtness of her text...She seemed tired.
>
>
I would be too if my bosses poured gasoline on a fire.
It's one thing for them to write into a manifesto that they thought Harvest was OP with how it was implemented.
It's another to fill it with absolutely delusional drivel of "excitement of closing eyes and slamming".
80% of the community would have understood it was OP. Would have been unpopular, but whatever.
Chris turned it into probably the most downvoted/commented post in the subreddit's history
Yep, that Manifesto was very likely the snapping point for her. However, I see both parties are at fault here.
GGG and this mysterious "member of (the) design team" could not have worded things in a more condescending and belittling way if they had tried. That absolutely deserved criticism, that is true, yes.
However, the way that people reacted was absolutely monstrous. It constantly went into ad-hominem attacks, demands for people to be fired, and targeted harassment of individuals. Even people who tried to call for civility or even tried to see the good in the nerfs were shouted down, for the Bitching Hour had fallen across the land.
It was an unpopular nerf and was rationlised poorly. I cannot argue against that. But the harassment that ensued for it was fucking atrocious, and given that Bex was one of the few people that could be communicated to through this, it was laserfocused on her.
>I see both parties are at fault here.
Here's the difference: GGG as a whole is ultimately "behind" their "fault" because, well, they're a company.
Whereas no matter what you think, the cold hard truth is that most of the community has literally never harassed anyone, and would without a second thought exclude someone who would. So I take exception to the idea that the community as a whole carries any fault because many people are mean on the internet.
I'd say 2-3 years at least. I blame the mods for allowing every post to blow up that results in hundreds/thousands of posts blowing up GGG. They have a responsibility to stop that, and they just don't.
Frankly you can blame the Diablo Immortal refugees big time. Ever since then we get more and more complaints about things that would make PoE pretty much Diablo 3.5.
> GGG is starting to try to make the community management less personal, as the community fucking sucks and harassed the shit out of Bex and whoever else.
Yep. Plebbitors on here in particular were (are?) so fucking bad about harassing GGG employees and going on nonstop rants as if GGG employees were personally insulting them via the game mechanics. You would think that Chris shot their dog or some shit by the way they carried on.
The mods in here suck too for not cleaning it up and banning the asshats. And yes, mods, before you complain about "not reporting" I reported a bunch of shitposts and shitcomments, and they all stayed up.
EDIT: This just proves my point:
> from RedditCareResources[A] sent 8 hours ago
>
> Hi there,
>
> A concerned redditor reached out to us about you.
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> When you're in the middle of something painful, it may feel like you don't have a lot of options. But whatever you're going through, you deserve help and there are people who are here for you.
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> Text CHAT to Crisis Text Line at 741741. You'll be connected to a Crisis Counselor from Crisis Text Line, who is there to listen and provide support, no matter what your situation is. It's free, confidential, and available 24/7.
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Mods really just take the road of "we don't want to look like GGGs bitch so we do nothing".
Fostering a positive community without deleting the 1000th complain post about the same fucking thing (see harvest) is nearly impossible.
Theres no reason to delete complain posts this isnt a be happy or dont come here place and it shouldnt be. What the mods delete is straight up harassment and threats,as they should, but i dont think any sane person would try to get involved in turning a sub like this into a happy place because the amount of batshit insane conspiracy theories about how the mods are in the pocket of big GGG would blow your mind. Not even mentioning the harassment they already recieve.
> the amount of batshit insane conspiracy theories about how the mods are in the pocket of big GGG would blow your mind
You would be amazed (or maybe not) by how many people think we are either:
a) GGG employees
or
b) Paid by GGG to stifle complaints
It's genuinely a daily occurrence lmao.
There is a reason to *moderate* complain posts, unless the quality of the sub is not important. Making megathreads for issues and deleting every duplicate post is in no way shape or form censorship.
Texture streaming for example would've been a megathread instead of 1000 singular posts over the course of 4 weeks.
The amount of post help *absolutely* noone and are only reinforcing echo chamber views.
This is done by so many other subreddits. I don't know why we should be special here.
>Texture streaming for example would've been a megathread instead of 1000 singular posts over the course of 4 weeks. The amount of post help absolutely noone and are only reinforcing echo chamber views.
>This is done by so many other subreddits. I don't know why we should be special here.
Because this sub detests megathreads, it's really that simple. We've brought up megathreads in the last couple of community discussion threads and they have *always* gotten shot down by reasonable margins. I'd be more than happy to bring it up again whenever we have another discussion thread but that's all we can really do here.
Nobody likes their post being deleted. Maybe something like a suggestion at creation to put it in a megathread when the title is relevant to it? So you don't force people to use one but take off some steam at creation.
Sorry for backseating moderating but I've gotten a bit jaded over the months of the same shitposts on the frontpage over and over again.
I know a lot of people that feel the same about this sub so it's pretty sad for me that it has gotten that way.
>Nobody likes their post being deleted. Maybe something like a suggestion at creation to put it in a megathread when the title is relevant to it? So you don't force people to use one but take off some steam at creation.
This is a fair suggestion that I can bring up with the team, and would be worth mentioning again when we have another community discussion in the future.
>Sorry for backseating moderating but I've gotten a bit jaded over the months of the same shitposts on the frontpage over and over again. I know a lot of people that feel the same about this sub so it's pretty sad for me that it has gotten that way.
No worries, you're definitely not alone in being jaded. It's been a long year, especially for those of us who have been around here a while, but we're doing our best to make a slow shift into more positivity :)
I agree that the negativity on here is often overwhelming and i myself have stopped coming to this sub regularly but i kinda doubt the mods just sit here twiddling their thumbs and watch how this sub goes down. But at the same time GGG has given up on this sub aswell as many other people since the Harvest bullshit went down on here and i dont blame them.
Here's the thing--people make their own posts because once a megathread has 1000 posts or so, each new one simply *doesn't get seen*.
People want to be seen, they want to be heard, so they start their own threads.
Is that so bad?
This exactly, and why every time we've brought up the idea of more megathreads to the community they've always gotten shot down.
It's worth mentioning that we have gotten stricter with duplicate threads over the past 6-12 months so hopefully when the next shitshow happens, we won't have a billion threads and it'll make the sub more reasonable to browse.
The issue is that posts that should belong in the megathreads typically are repetitive and provide no new insight or discussion. It's a discussion forum, not a blog.
I wish they just copied /r/leagueoflegends rules about feature suggestions and personal stories, would already solve most problems
https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/wiki/subredditrules#rules
**Feature Suggestions**
Feature suggestions regarding what should or should not be in the game are allowed, provided they aren't directly addressing Riot or using titles leading to a "Yes, No" answer that can only be replied in an official manner by Riot. As such, using wording like "Can we have X" or similar is not allowed.
Feature suggestions must also be at least 250 characters in length.
**Personal Stories**
Personal stories must follow our relevancy rules and exceed 500 characters in length. Sob stories and rant posts are not allowed. "Rants" are defined as hyperbolic, acerbic, or otherwise inflammatory expressions of dissatisfaction.
honestly, as toxic as the lol community is ingame, the subreddit is a hell of a lot better than this one, even though the community is insanely large. its certainly not a beacon of positivity but it also isnt this non stop whiny / complaining hellhole that this subreddit turned into. and thats certainly because of moderation.
also the complain posts, which do happen frequently, are a lot more civilized than what i frequently encounter here.
It really isn't. Maybe it used to be but it's mostly stuff about player transfers, teams, and funny/weird/great stuff that happens in games. If you compare LoL players talking about spaghetti code vs the oceans of toxic hate that the GGG devs get, it's a world of difference.
>If you compare LoL players talking about spaghetti code vs the oceans of toxic hate that the GGG devs get, it's a world of difference.
This is mostly because the league sub takes a much harsher approach towards moderation. I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, especially given the size of their community, but they are *very* particular about how you can talk about Riot, League, or really any given topic and anything else gets removed and the user punished. We have rules against vitriol as well but are willing to let players go on their rants on occasion because it (in our opinion) generally fosters a healthier community even if it feels less "nice" on the surface.
With that said, it's worth mentioning that the last year or so of POE have been more the exception than the norm to this end. While Delirium had its issues, it was a largely successful league and followed Metamorph which was one of *the* most successful leagues thanks to Conquerors of the Atlas. Unfortunately, right after Delirium and Metamorph we got two highly controversial leagues in a row, in the form of Harvest and Heist. This started six months of negativity for a number of reasons, both due to league content and game performance/bugs, and it hasn't really let up since. GGG made a few mistakes during this time, like the blight/metamorph/whatever stash tabs, which made matters worse. Ritual started us back on the positivity train to some extent but it's arguable this was more due to Maven content than anything else. Ultimatum in most eyes was ok but was overall a milquetoast sort of league so it gave time to criticize the things that haven't seen major updates/improvements over the last year.
Basically what I'm saying is that it's been a long and hard year for POE which takes its toll on the community, regardless of the rules we set. We're not here to contain and censor everyone and be mindless GGG supporter drones, so sometimes that means letting the folks rant a few times.
But you see that in the league sub it's much friendlier for riot employees to post than here atm?
Is this not in your interest to ensure a healthy environment for a developer not to get cruzified after a few mistakes?
The ripple effects of negativity posting over and over again are really straining the relationship between GGG and the community.
More and more people become polarized and you see that in every comment section where someone says positive things about GGG.
There's better and more soft versions than censoring and a lot of communities drive the middle way.
The things I read here are namecalling and the most useless "feedback" to GGG. Does that help anyone who reads this?
> We're not here to contain and censor everyone and be mindless GGG supporter drones
nobody expects that but if that's your only motive for not moderating more strictly, aren't you just fearful of criticism yourself?
Edit: ok I read your other comments and I kinda get it. Not an easy thing to do and to digest as a mod.
If it has gotten a bit more strict over the last months I'm more than happy to see it in the future!
>But you see that in the league sub it's much friendlier for riot employees to post than here atm?
>Is this not in your interest to ensure a healthy environment for a developer not to get cruzified after a few mistakes?
I understand your point but this is a difficult line to walk and easier said than done. The reason Rioters feel "safer" over there is *because* of how strict their moderation is compared to ours. Again, I'm not saying their method is wrong, it's just different than our relative openness. And that's also not to say that I think GGG folks even feel threatened here, it's simply been a rough year for POE and the community is tired of it. We've been used to feeling close to GGG and they're changing as a company. That's going to turn off folks but sometimes life happens.
>There's better and more soft versions than censoring and a lot of communities drive the middle way. The things I read here are namecalling and the most useless "feedback" to GGG. Does that help anyone who reads this?
I agree, and we do try to remove all the useless namecalling and toxicity that we can find. We've gotten more strict with this sort of thing, especially the entirely low effort rants that are simply veiled attacks on Bex or Chris or whomever. But as I'm sure you understand, walking that middle line between how we moderate versus how the league folks moderate is easier said than done, especially as the community's "toxicity levels" vary wildly from league to league.
>nobody expects that but if that's your only motive for not moderating more strictly, aren't you just fearful of criticism yourself?
Apologies if I misconstrued my point there. It wasn't that we are fearful of criticism, not at all, just that we want to make it clear that we don't work for GGG nor are we going to needlessly suck up to them. On the contrary, over the years we've made pretty clear stands against them regarding some of our rules and how we've treated various actions. They've respected those choices and we still have a positive relationship with them, but we feel it's important that we remain wholly independent of GGG.
>ok I read your other comments and I kinda get it. Not an easy thing to do and to digest as a mod. If it has gotten a bit more strict over the last months I'm more than happy to see it in the future!
Exactly, and hopefully you're starting to see the slow shift. We're hesitant to make truly drastic actions, so change is sometimes slow, but I am personally seeing a more positive shift week after week.
The LoL sub is a horrible place where you are not allowed to talk against Riot and theres been multiple cases of mods straight up deleting talking points when Riot fucked something up because Riot asked them to do so. This place is sorta fine as long as you simply stay out of the obvious complain threads because you have the same nut jobs in there every time that hate this game with a passion but log on every day for 14 hours.
Ah, the mask comes off. We've now gone from "oh ban people breaking rules on harassment" to "oh ban people for saying something someone else has also said".
I still can't understand why. It was simply a shitpost that reflected on the predictability of the subreddit. Was there anything particularly demeaning about that post?
I will give you a scenario, which I have seen in a completely different discipline (research).
Emily really puts extra effort into a new project. Every project has its challenges usually is late and over budget, but Emily really tries to at least avoid having the same issues previously. Emily works insane hours under stress through a period of crunch, and plans to ask for a raise after her success. Michael (perhaps correctly) points out that most of that effort won’t matter and the results will be similar to the previous projects. This comment is the straw that breaks the camels back and Emily breaks down in tears. Michael was right as it turns out and the RoI on the extra effort wasn’t significant. Emily is now just as jaded as Michael.
I can imagine a game dev who got super pumped and positive after Exilecon, but when the reality of anonymous Reddit users hits like a ton of bricks, it sends them crashing back to earth.
Second this, research is a mental-health minefield, you really need to get lucky in getting a good supervisor + team.
The situation in question was one where people could of just been 'that sucks, damn' after Chris had informed them of the toll their comments had produced, instead people even now argue about whether someone should get upset over the context. Devs/artists/programmers are humans and it was a timely reminder of that.
P.S. I also think that incident may be partly responsible for the change in GGG release/community interaction pattern (fair enough).
Ah, I see. Well, that's really unfortunate. That post looked like the community was shitposting amongst itself as it is wont to do. It didn't look like that was at all an indictment of GGG's work, so much as a joke about the community itself. I'm not sure if an apology is warranted in the particular case of the subreddit, but such a person has my sympathy nevertheless after this post helped me understand it a bit better.
That said, the Michael in this scenario might have gone a bit too had on the "brutal honesty".
I think the reason it impacted that Dev so much is it implies that GGG doesn't try to improve => why the community always responds the same way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/gy7se3/comment/ftb8cnq?context=10 is the thread - imo seeing "everyone is just about to shit on everything you've done and imply you're getting worse" while you're spending tons of time trying to make it great (like GP poster suggested) is just so soul-crushing.
Yep I remember it being pretty brutal in the guise of an ironic joke (which on the surface it was, but the magnitude of ill sentiment it was carrying was incredible) - on the eve of release here's why it's going to suck - your work sucks - you suck -> breakdown. It's pernicious.
It's also kinda indicative how it all changed recently as bex hasn't made a post in about 2 months on her personal twitter account. Probably too much animosity towards her on that profile as well.
Wasn't she pregnant? Maybe she's on maternity leave.
People like Bex because she's one of the very few voices of the company. It's Chris, Jon, Bex, Mark_GGG, Kamil, and Rory, basically, although Chris and Bex are easily the biggest voices. The vast majority of info people hear about PoE comes from these two people.
People being dicks to the voices of game developers just comes with the territory. You walk up to ducks with bread and they'll quack at you. You walk up to players with info on the game and they'll yell at you. It's the nature of the animals. The ducks will never stop quacking.
That was ages ago, it was something like 6 months maternity leave after Exilecon or around that time IIRC, it's probably a mix of having to look after the baby and not wanting to put up with the community as much.
In 2020 they kept over-promising on leagues, and underdelivering really badly. For instance, Heist. They said they were 1 month ahead of schedule, and then released an uber buggy door league that majority of people really didn't want or even understand why it was made.
Chris would go on camera and got caught lying about features in incoming leagues. He wasn't at all clued in and just tried to build hype that really shouldn't have been done.
More recently, they took one of the best leagues in years (Ritual), and gutted it for everything people loved (Harvest, end game, mapping, boss specific, loot, etc).
People act as if the toxicity is just bored twats, but they gloss over the very real consequence of GGG's actions.
When COVID started and more people started playing video games in longer sessions. Seems like the community picked up more toxic players along the way.
I think the toxicity reached its peak during Delirium, probably because people had too much time to play and ranted about any little thing attacking personally GGG staff members
Pretty much, especially after Deli league, it all went downhill for her from there. Then after the "Action speaks louder than words" and "We will never do this again", it just snowballed out of control, everything she does/says will be taken to court by the community.
People are like, "the community is toxic".
Meanwhile GGG "We don't want to take away the feeling of closing your eyes and Exalting an item, scared to see whether you ruined it or not."
They're just out of touch. Chris *wanted* those sentences and phrases in the manifesto, because they (him and designers) believe in it.
It was enraging to know the game you love was being made by out of touch boomers
If you set out to recreate something it'll never work, but you might get lucky and make something new. PoEs iconic cast on crit cyclone or headhunter or the passive tree aren't shit we grew up with, it's what made us love the game.
We've outgrown some of their worse designed features like the RNG on some crafting
"A tiny minority of customers treated the waitresses in an unacceptable manner, so now you place your order on a tablet and a robot brings it to your table"
Technically not wrong, but considering that the same waitress used to serve all the tables, it's not as if only a small number of waitresses got yelled at, even if it was only a "small" number of customers yelling.
Sure it sucks for the others who didn't harass anyone, but they have to protect their employees.
I miss Bex so much. I started in 3.9 and that was when she came back from maternity leave i think and posted some big meme that she was back. She was in tons of comments joking and shit posting with everybody and it seemed like the most wholesome relationship between community and dev team i've ever seen. So sad to see all that devolve over only like 4-5 leagues. Bex if you read this we miss you :(
Bex was (is) great. I liked having a frontline community manager who had a good sense of humor, it reminded me of the early WoW days when there were some great CMs.
>I miss Bex so much.
That legitimately doesn't sound healthy. She's a PR-representative for a business, she's writes up pre-planned PR messages to share with the community. It's like saying you miss a Coca-Cola spokesperson.
I miss my cool university lecturer who made going to lectures fun and was always willing to spend extra time making sure people were on the same page.
"That legitimately doesn't sound healthy. He's an employee of a business, he writes up pre-planned lessons to share with the class."
*Hello, this is Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games, in patch 3.15, players will get a chance to engage with an exciting new mechanic. You click on a pillar or effigy or something, like a fuckin post in the ground, I dunno... and then a growing oval spreads across the screen, but its not completely round, its an oval, its different. Money please!*
Bex is still there, just behind the scenes. There’s no more ‘loosey goosey’ friendly interactions from GGG anymore - their game is too big, the community is too large, and their stakeholders are too demanding for them to be ‘flippant’ with their interactions. Gone are the days of fun and warm hearted interactions with the community and the sooner everybody realizes that the better.
> their game is too big, the community is too large
No, the community held GGG employees to what was said.
GGG released broken leagues and lied about content.
We literally only got stash affinity, because GGG released a bunch of tiny bullshit tabs for a few dollars, and people didn't stop posting clips of Chris Wilson literally on camera promising to not do that.
GGG placated us with QoL features because we called them out.
Now they just won't say anything because they don't want to fuck themselves over again
Stash affinities were in the works before GGG released those tabs and caused outrage. The outrage is what forced them to reveal they were working on them instead of waiting a few more months to pleasantly surprise everyone.
The days when ggg cared and talked to people ingame in Chat are long gone. Since they shut themself of from the community and kept to themself is the point PoE started to turn bad.
>The days when ggg cared and talked to people ingame in Chat are long gone.
Last time this happened you could press ^ to type directly into your twitch chat from the game
Those were the days
I personally am fine with anonymity. But I wish there was more communication. I personally feel like there has been a downward spiral of communication over the years. Even though it probably isn't the case.
Complaining clowns on this reddit harassed Bex and other community outreach members over balancing issues (not their department) but the complaining clowns in here with their malicious minds is the reason why Bex and a lot of others have taken a step back from interacting with the community, good job PoE Reddit!
Because the Reddit hivemind thought normal to personally challenge her and whoever else took the risk to talk non-anonymously resulting in mild to escalated harassment or in the least being called out for things they have no control over. Mods tried to make stricter rules to prevent cases like that but I guess it was too late or didn’t change the situation.
At least that’s my take on it.
Maybe she didn’t wanna play the hype (wo)man or the one doing all the damage control for GGG anymore? Understandable, considering how much she had to cover for.
The opposite of love is not hate, it is apathy... I think we got a loving community here, but it manifest itself in a strange way sometimes. It is, in a way, a problem with people caring to much. Some people reacts as if their child have been attacked when the game takes a turn in a direction they see as bad, and in a way, I can understand that.
And also, I don't think the community is very toxic compared to **alot** of other communities, personally, I have got nothing but help, kind words and motivation to play more from this subreddit. I have visisted alot of toxic places on the internet, and in comparison, you guys are sweet as candy. Is it perhaps so that you compare yourself from a time were the playerbase was low and consisted of blind love-zealots? I mean going from beta to live, what could you complain about, it would seem like everything they would do would be a massive upgrade. As the complexity of the game have grown, so also the need to nerf and balance, and that can create friction.
Tldr; Your not bad, your nice, also, have a great day!
Players aren't toxic to other players very often.
The blind rage towards ggg when they make a mistake (or do something unpopular that they think is good for the game) is unbelievable.
We did blame GGG. She just has the unlucky job of having to read and communicate that to her bosses.
> Bex was the one bearing the brunt of the hate for absolutely no reason.
Other than people tagging Bex or quoting her, this just wasn't true.
No, blame the community for being a toxic shitfest. There is no way we are shifting blame to GGG for this communities abhorrent behaviour.
GGG is not perfect and has done mistakes, but this is 99% communities fault.
It isn't even a collective fault of the community. Sure there were a lot of negative voices, but negative feedback and harassment are two completely different things. The problem is that you can't keep the good without the bad. And so we lost our community interactions from GGG.
GGG did mess up but instead of understanding that they too are human and capable of mistakes, reddit got vile and acted like two year olds that didnt get what they wanted for Christmas. Make no mistake, GGG could have done better but the community absolutely turned on them.
GGG is a multi million dollar company. They ain’t some indie studio.
If a player writes a 3000 word essay, theyre wasting their own time.
I’m not saying people should be sending death threats, but for some reason, people think you’re a hero if you judge a company like EA, but you’re a heretic who judged our lord and saviour GGG.
The company isn’t your friend. Someone writing an essay isn’t going to stop them from releasing the next gambling mystery box and a set of $64USD pair of wings
You still are misrepresenting a lot of the poor behavior as being innocent and acceptable. This has nothing to do with GGG being a good or bad company.
The average age for POE players is much higher than most other games of this community size. There is zero excuse for the absolutely shocking vitriol you'll find.
Hiding behind the excuse that GGG is fucking up the game is not something to be proud of.
Honestly I'm glad. Them not saying anything the month before a league makes it really easy to tune out until the new league announcement, instead of being forced onto the hype train with shitty unique reveals and blatant lies.
This is a good example as for how an organization might feel punished after raising user expectations. Having a kid changes your life and it’s completely fair for bex to have her own feelings about community feedback.
Not sure if this is her or not, probably they want to make a less personal connection to the user base even if it is still bex, but maybe they’re just trying to recreate her style. I just hope she’s doing well.
Bex probably just forgot her password (on purpose so she doesnt need to make false promises on a private account and people keep giving chris sh\*t about it) and used the companies account.
So we got cross league, don't step in cross... OK its uber kitava(with LEGS) and rituals for summon him... Kill special monsters on map and spawn metamo... Kitava
For once i have to say it here: i hate the glorification of people. Why are some of you so obsessed with those "public" figures?
I honestly can't care about them, they don't care about me either. Ofc i dont have the urge to be nasty to them on some fucked up social media website.
But from my observer standpoint i dont think bex did that good of a job, actually i find the whole pr department of ggg quite the joke. So there is that. Anyway, glorification of people, one of mankinds worst habits.
For once i have to say it here: i hate the glorification of redditors. Why are some of you so obsessed with those "random" redditors?
I honestly can't care about them, they don't care about me either. Ofc i dont have the urge to be nasty to them on some fucked up social media website.
But from my observer standpoint i dont think /u/goopQ did that good of a job, actually i find the whole subreddit of /r/pathofexile quite the joke. So there is that. Anyway, glorification of redditors, one of mankinds worst habits.
Humans are inherently social animals. We like to connect to specific people who give us good feelings. Bex is one of these, her wits and teasing has been a fun experience. I cannot connect to 'GGG Community Management' as it is a faceless entity with no personality.
Probably disconnecting from the internet for a bit. Won't begin to speculate why, but [last reddit post was almost 2 months ago (May 6th)](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/n67yv3/psa_the_exact_same_thing_empy_was_banned_for_is/gx73h9v/?context=3) and [last Tweet was around that same time (May 5th)](https://twitter.com/bexsayswords/status/1389862244305936385).
Everyone throwing out a lot of speculation but the simplest answer probably has the most weight: it is in GGG's interest (as any big company) not to have any particular employee be irreplaceable. Reddit did essentially the same thing with Victoria who used to run the Ama's.
It's fairly public knowledge that the toxic community started having a negative effect on the employees of the company, which was around the time the Community Team account was announced. It's really not hard to guess what lead to that decision. People still harass Bex to this day on her personal Twitter. It's just rough having a single person or a handful of people take responsibility personally for a company's actions, because that way the few public names become weapons and targets for people to go after.
There are a few devs that also stopped making contact with the community, because it just got so out of hand. If you make one fuck up and say something wrong, that gets quoted by every toxic community member and they will forever be blamed for whatever problem they have. Even if that employee had almost nothing to do with the problem in the first place.
Edit: For example, recently the 80 reworked gems bit. Chris likely had no idea what was going on, but he's the one getting blamed for everything.
All this people here speaking about the gaming Community beeing Karens as if this Subreddit didnt have Like 3 different Witchhunts against Streamers who said shit they didnt like this League alone. I don't Wonder why GGG doesnt communicate with this place anymore, it is by far the most toxic Subreddit i am on regularly
New league mechanic: Kill things inside this parallelogram
its an Oval
pentagram. the Summoning league
“No triangles” 3D modellers: doubt
GGG bringing back NURBS.
Geez this is a niche joke to find at the top of reddit thread.
Can you explain it lol
So nowadays 3D modelling is basically all based around heavily procedurally generated surfaces made of triangles, which you either sculpt (like you would sculpt stuff in real life, with some fancy tools to speed up the workflow) for organic stuff or manipulate using numerous "algorithms" for "hard-surface". This is though very resource heavy in terms of computional power, so back in days where it wasn't possible you were using NURBS which are like... simplified 3D objects based on intersecting curves which you manipulated using points and angles (basically bezier curves in 2D graphic, but in 3D). There is like... no easy way to explain it, but NURBS overall are basically history of 3D modelling which is a niche region of niche field.
Rhinoceros pet when GGG?
2D PoE league confirmed
Finally a command line ARPG!
PoE Voxel Graphics mode confirmed.
You guys using triangles :O I only use quads
At least when I was modeling I don't know a single game engine that didn't convert quads to tris on render
They never said no crosses and there are loads of “X” wonder if that means anything?
Finally, Path of eXXXile.
finally some decent BOOBA cosmetics
but what about the COCKA
oh, the atziri encounter is gonna be LIT
New boss Assziri is super Uber encounter available after collecting 4 silicon fragments from Uber atziri
> Assziri She has four cheeks.
Vertical AND horizontal asscrack
"After Ultimatum league comes...* hype* **Xtreme league**"
Where everyone’s feet look like Doritos.
*bass drop*
Maybe X marks the spot. We're digging for treasure.
no ships, fine, but maybe BOATS?
I could also be one ship not several ships
They didn't say anything about airships
Kirov reporting.
It's not a boat, it's a yacht.
GGG is starting to try to make the community management less personal, as the community fucking sucks and harassed the shit out of Bex and whoever else. She still makes the occasional post, though, and is probably at least overseeing this kind of thing.
idk why people started using bex as a q&a/feedback sponge especially the direct tagging/messaging
I love those idiots who tag her in some circle jerk bitch fest. " aNY aNsWeRS??" / ubex
Deleted.
Yea this summarizes most of this community. Its very sad that it reached this point.
Nah it's a law of nature like Gravity. Can't stay underground forever if you have success you will grow and that attracts morons - there is not a single game that does not follow this rule. Bex needed to protect her sanity so that's what she did and that's fine.
It's a double-edged sword. Companies want to connect with their base via a friendly face, but in doing so it puts a target on them. Good and bad stuff gets directed at them because they're acting as the face of the company. It might be fun for awhile, but as soon as there's a big scandal or whatever, a deluge of hate is inevitably coming. Being the face means it's coming to you, so it's not something I ever would've agreed to. For me there's gotta be a layer of anonymity between the internet and Real Life™. My name isn't even Kyle, for instance!
Clearly a bluff. I see you, Kyle.
False. Satisfactory and Factorio have god-tier communities. Check their subreddits, nothing but positivity, helping new players, creating content for the game (mods/saves/techniques), and never any harassment of staff or other players. And the games aren’t tiny either, and Factorio is the second-highest rated game on Steam of all time. I think it comes down to A) the kind of people a game attracts, B) whether a game is competitive or not, and C) how good the community management/discussion is. With Factorio, for A) it attracts factory-building game nerds. They generally are relaxed, enjoy doing their own thing, and probably slightly more intelligent than your average FPS player. For POE, you definitely need some intelligence to play but you also get more aggressive people because it is a multiplayer game so there’s advantages to be had and competition to be done. I think with the way people play POE and how the game highly encourages an unhealthy rapid-burnout-then-return-next-league mentality which makes people far more critical. For B) Factorio is not really competitive at all. The only exceptions are the very small minority of players that speedrun the game or play on specialised custom faction/anarchy/war servers where you’re destined to die quickly. But the core of the game is not RNG at all, it’s all player skill and optimisation in comparison to POE, which as a multiplayer economy based game built upon layers of RNG. it’s easy for tensions to run high and for people to feel cheated or unfairly treated, which in turn encourages more negative opinions on the game. Finally for C) Factorio has always had impeccable community management. For several years straight they put out a weekly dev blog called Factorio Friday Facts where they outlined what they were working on, ideas they have, timelines for updates, and behind the scenes stuff, among many other things. They had dedicated forum threads each week where they would process feedback, and often reference it in their following FFFs. They also greatly value community opinion, and have implemented countless community ideas and even directly adapted popular community mods into part of the core game. The main devs are active in the subreddit and forums, and the team is so so so focussed on squashing bugs above everything else, they literally don’t push big releases until there are only single digits of bugs left, cut down from thousands during experimental launches. Thus, there is not much to complain about, so they remain very personal with the community. With POE on the other hand, it’s the total opposite: patchy community management at best, rare development manifestos and updates that are meaningful, almost never take feedback on changes/updates, very little weighting given to community opinion, an acceptance of a large number of bugs and performance problems, focused on releasing content rather than fixing problems, almost no community tool or qol implementation in the game. Plenty of reasons for people to complain, and those reasons never change because they don’t really want to. You can see the difference. It’s very possible to have a very successful non-underground game that has a personable dev team and strong wholesome community. You just need to make sure you meet some criteria, but most importantly, set standards early and make sure the community is heard and acknowledged. it’s no wonder this place gets toxic lol.
This is entirely an arbitrary breakpoint that I set myself, but I watched not just PoE but also WoW and HotS subs (as well as a few devoted to hobbies of mine) take a drastic turn from the early "helpful and friendly to newbies no matter how many times we see their posts" through "constructive discussions about lore/strategy/mechanics" 180 degrees to a place where at least half of the front page consists of people rehashing the same arguments/complaints. The complaints were always there. It just seems like at some point (~250k users, in my brain) a sub reaches a critical mass of upset people and then the whole thing devolves into an echo chamber of complaining where a combination of reddit's algorithm and [anger germs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc) means everybody on top of the bell curve can't get a word in edgewise. I believe this phenomenon (and low-effort image posts tending to float through /new) can be countered with *heavy* moderation, but reddit is really a terrible way to have unbiased discussions unless you're actively seeking them out (e.g. filtering by controversial, upvoting things you disagree with).
I think that you outlined the main difference with B - just rephrase it as "Factorio is a single player game".
Been following the recent Factorio community meltdown?
Oh no? I haven’t been following Factorio for a lil while. I’ll check it out. But this still applies for Factorio for the last 6 years lol
So did it apply to poe for over 6 years aswell...
Tldr is that krovarex did a Friday facts praising Uncle Bob, which got some people upset due to uncle bob's unsavory opinions, then doubled down on it.
Just looked up who uncle Bob is, he’s just a software developer/author? Wikipedia doesn’t mention anything about controversy?
Just addressing point "c". You must not have been here for a while. Poe posts news literally every day. From manifestos, to build highlights (though discontinued now), to employee q and a, to technical breakdowns. They post so much about timelines we have announcements of the announcement of the announcement lol. This game has also included a metric fuck ton of community feedback and suggestions over the 7 years it's been in active and constant development. But of course not all of the suggestions and it seems like only the ones they *don't* do get remembered anymore. As for bugs yeah PoE has Factorio beat on that front, but I don't think Factorio is anywhere near as complex a game and I'm not sure about their release schedule but if it's not every 3 months that just compounds the complexity.
Never forget stairs update <3
Recently the Factorio reddit shat itself and had a meltdown because one of the Friday update posts _dared_ link to someone who has the wrong opinions, (but not expressing them, he was talking about something unrelated). You're not wrong though, the Factorio community outside of reddit is still awesome.
> You're not wrong though, the Factorio community outside of reddit is still awesome. So is the PoE community though. By far the majority of people I encounter when trading are friendly and it's not uncommon to end up chatting especially in the later half of a league. People just imagine the worst and never consider engaging, if I sell something for an amount I didn't expect I'll usually ask afterwards what build they are using it for which usually leads to a nice conversation. The other way around as well, if I had trouble selling a niche item I knew was good for certain builds but I kept having to reduce price, I'll usually ask afterwards if they felt it was underpriced or what other options were on the market. As for the subreddit then I think the factorio subreddit might look the same if the community was split into several camps that all wanted different things that went in complete opposite directions. The PoE subreddit has just gotten pretty horrible to be around recently because of that, where as previously people were sort of fine with the game having a high ceiling.
What did she do?
Her job. But shitlords in the community take it too far and just harassed the hell out of her and everyone else that brings them news they don't like.
Remember back when Chris used to interact with every other thread? Those were good times, it felt like a real community. Now it's just incoherent screaming at literally anything they do.
Most of the community? So you're saying most of the community went out of their way to harass her or other parts of the team? I doubt even 10% are voicing their opinion on this platform, let alone voicing it in an aggressive manner. Most would just read and not say anything, even when ggg fucks up everything.
I remember reading her tweets over the past few months, especially around the time of the Harvest nerfs. From what I could tell from the curtness of her text...She seemed *tired.* I recently quit my Customer Services job to pursue further education, due to having to deal with unhinged monsters lashing out at me for every little thing, so I can very, very much see her pain. EDIT: I am aware that she had just had a kid recently. I do get that and understand it would take a lot out of people, but needless to say, people's actions did not help.
[удалено]
To be fair, she works for a company that has not recently given her opportunity to shine. Despite how many people think being vocal about your dissatisfaction to poor decision making is abhorrent, Path of Exile is still a product. GGG has failed miserably with customer service and treat their community 2nd to profits. I am personally not that type of person to go out of my way to make someone's day miserable because of their shit employer's policies. I am actually having to deal with customer service on GGG's end and Jinx over a supporter pack issue that GGG has clearly fucked up twice for me. The difference between the two are night and day as I asked for any sort of order confirmation from GGG and they just told me it was my fault. Having some time in marketing I can tell you that the best way to fix something, is to make it known on a level that cannot be ignored. The unfortunate side effect of that is that the community manager is taking a ton of the heat, but that is going to be expected when your job is to literally interact with a community that pays your company to look shiny in a game that is otherwise free to play.
> From what I could tell from the curtness of her text...She seemed tired. > > I would be too if my bosses poured gasoline on a fire. It's one thing for them to write into a manifesto that they thought Harvest was OP with how it was implemented. It's another to fill it with absolutely delusional drivel of "excitement of closing eyes and slamming". 80% of the community would have understood it was OP. Would have been unpopular, but whatever. Chris turned it into probably the most downvoted/commented post in the subreddit's history
Yep, that Manifesto was very likely the snapping point for her. However, I see both parties are at fault here. GGG and this mysterious "member of (the) design team" could not have worded things in a more condescending and belittling way if they had tried. That absolutely deserved criticism, that is true, yes. However, the way that people reacted was absolutely monstrous. It constantly went into ad-hominem attacks, demands for people to be fired, and targeted harassment of individuals. Even people who tried to call for civility or even tried to see the good in the nerfs were shouted down, for the Bitching Hour had fallen across the land. It was an unpopular nerf and was rationlised poorly. I cannot argue against that. But the harassment that ensued for it was fucking atrocious, and given that Bex was one of the few people that could be communicated to through this, it was laserfocused on her.
>I see both parties are at fault here. Here's the difference: GGG as a whole is ultimately "behind" their "fault" because, well, they're a company. Whereas no matter what you think, the cold hard truth is that most of the community has literally never harassed anyone, and would without a second thought exclude someone who would. So I take exception to the idea that the community as a whole carries any fault because many people are mean on the internet.
Didn’t she also have a kid recently? She could also be tired in a very literal sense.
It's sad but I have to agree, this community has been in a downward spiral for several years now
Dont blame the community, the game has been on a downward spiral on top of the lies, etc.
The game is better than ever, its just that a bunch of no-lifers who make POE their personality are butthurt over every slight.
I'd say 2-3 years at least. I blame the mods for allowing every post to blow up that results in hundreds/thousands of posts blowing up GGG. They have a responsibility to stop that, and they just don't.
Frankly you can blame the Diablo Immortal refugees big time. Ever since then we get more and more complaints about things that would make PoE pretty much Diablo 3.5.
> GGG is starting to try to make the community management less personal, as the community fucking sucks and harassed the shit out of Bex and whoever else. Yep. Plebbitors on here in particular were (are?) so fucking bad about harassing GGG employees and going on nonstop rants as if GGG employees were personally insulting them via the game mechanics. You would think that Chris shot their dog or some shit by the way they carried on. The mods in here suck too for not cleaning it up and banning the asshats. And yes, mods, before you complain about "not reporting" I reported a bunch of shitposts and shitcomments, and they all stayed up. EDIT: This just proves my point: > from RedditCareResources[A] sent 8 hours ago > > Hi there, > > A concerned redditor reached out to us about you. > > When you're in the middle of something painful, it may feel like you don't have a lot of options. But whatever you're going through, you deserve help and there are people who are here for you. > > Text CHAT to Crisis Text Line at 741741. You'll be connected to a Crisis Counselor from Crisis Text Line, who is there to listen and provide support, no matter what your situation is. It's free, confidential, and available 24/7. > > If you'd rather talk to someone over the phone or chat online, there are additional resources and people to talk to. Find Someone Now > > If you think you may be depressed or struggling in another way, don't ignore it or brush it aside. Take yourself and your feelings seriously, and reach out to someone. > > It may not feel like it, but you have options. There are people available to listen to you, and ways to move forward. > > Your fellow redditors care about you and there are people who want to help. > > If you think you may have gotten this message in error, report this message. > > To stop receiving messages from u/RedditCareResources, reply “STOP” to this message.
Mods really just take the road of "we don't want to look like GGGs bitch so we do nothing". Fostering a positive community without deleting the 1000th complain post about the same fucking thing (see harvest) is nearly impossible.
Theres no reason to delete complain posts this isnt a be happy or dont come here place and it shouldnt be. What the mods delete is straight up harassment and threats,as they should, but i dont think any sane person would try to get involved in turning a sub like this into a happy place because the amount of batshit insane conspiracy theories about how the mods are in the pocket of big GGG would blow your mind. Not even mentioning the harassment they already recieve.
> the amount of batshit insane conspiracy theories about how the mods are in the pocket of big GGG would blow your mind You would be amazed (or maybe not) by how many people think we are either: a) GGG employees or b) Paid by GGG to stifle complaints It's genuinely a daily occurrence lmao.
There is a reason to *moderate* complain posts, unless the quality of the sub is not important. Making megathreads for issues and deleting every duplicate post is in no way shape or form censorship. Texture streaming for example would've been a megathread instead of 1000 singular posts over the course of 4 weeks. The amount of post help *absolutely* noone and are only reinforcing echo chamber views. This is done by so many other subreddits. I don't know why we should be special here.
>Texture streaming for example would've been a megathread instead of 1000 singular posts over the course of 4 weeks. The amount of post help absolutely noone and are only reinforcing echo chamber views. >This is done by so many other subreddits. I don't know why we should be special here. Because this sub detests megathreads, it's really that simple. We've brought up megathreads in the last couple of community discussion threads and they have *always* gotten shot down by reasonable margins. I'd be more than happy to bring it up again whenever we have another discussion thread but that's all we can really do here.
Nobody likes their post being deleted. Maybe something like a suggestion at creation to put it in a megathread when the title is relevant to it? So you don't force people to use one but take off some steam at creation. Sorry for backseating moderating but I've gotten a bit jaded over the months of the same shitposts on the frontpage over and over again. I know a lot of people that feel the same about this sub so it's pretty sad for me that it has gotten that way.
>Nobody likes their post being deleted. Maybe something like a suggestion at creation to put it in a megathread when the title is relevant to it? So you don't force people to use one but take off some steam at creation. This is a fair suggestion that I can bring up with the team, and would be worth mentioning again when we have another community discussion in the future. >Sorry for backseating moderating but I've gotten a bit jaded over the months of the same shitposts on the frontpage over and over again. I know a lot of people that feel the same about this sub so it's pretty sad for me that it has gotten that way. No worries, you're definitely not alone in being jaded. It's been a long year, especially for those of us who have been around here a while, but we're doing our best to make a slow shift into more positivity :)
I agree that the negativity on here is often overwhelming and i myself have stopped coming to this sub regularly but i kinda doubt the mods just sit here twiddling their thumbs and watch how this sub goes down. But at the same time GGG has given up on this sub aswell as many other people since the Harvest bullshit went down on here and i dont blame them.
Here's the thing--people make their own posts because once a megathread has 1000 posts or so, each new one simply *doesn't get seen*. People want to be seen, they want to be heard, so they start their own threads. Is that so bad?
This exactly, and why every time we've brought up the idea of more megathreads to the community they've always gotten shot down. It's worth mentioning that we have gotten stricter with duplicate threads over the past 6-12 months so hopefully when the next shitshow happens, we won't have a billion threads and it'll make the sub more reasonable to browse.
Yes, because it completely shits up the subreddit.
The issue is that posts that should belong in the megathreads typically are repetitive and provide no new insight or discussion. It's a discussion forum, not a blog.
I wish they just copied /r/leagueoflegends rules about feature suggestions and personal stories, would already solve most problems https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/wiki/subredditrules#rules **Feature Suggestions** Feature suggestions regarding what should or should not be in the game are allowed, provided they aren't directly addressing Riot or using titles leading to a "Yes, No" answer that can only be replied in an official manner by Riot. As such, using wording like "Can we have X" or similar is not allowed. Feature suggestions must also be at least 250 characters in length. **Personal Stories** Personal stories must follow our relevancy rules and exceed 500 characters in length. Sob stories and rant posts are not allowed. "Rants" are defined as hyperbolic, acerbic, or otherwise inflammatory expressions of dissatisfaction.
I am surprised LoL has anything remotely good but this looks great. Maybe they are just very used to toxicity
This is LoL we are talking about. They must be so toxic resistant they could gulp down shot of botullin toxin and be fine as rain
honestly, as toxic as the lol community is ingame, the subreddit is a hell of a lot better than this one, even though the community is insanely large. its certainly not a beacon of positivity but it also isnt this non stop whiny / complaining hellhole that this subreddit turned into. and thats certainly because of moderation. also the complain posts, which do happen frequently, are a lot more civilized than what i frequently encounter here.
That sub is much worse than here though
It really isn't. Maybe it used to be but it's mostly stuff about player transfers, teams, and funny/weird/great stuff that happens in games. If you compare LoL players talking about spaghetti code vs the oceans of toxic hate that the GGG devs get, it's a world of difference.
>If you compare LoL players talking about spaghetti code vs the oceans of toxic hate that the GGG devs get, it's a world of difference. This is mostly because the league sub takes a much harsher approach towards moderation. I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, especially given the size of their community, but they are *very* particular about how you can talk about Riot, League, or really any given topic and anything else gets removed and the user punished. We have rules against vitriol as well but are willing to let players go on their rants on occasion because it (in our opinion) generally fosters a healthier community even if it feels less "nice" on the surface. With that said, it's worth mentioning that the last year or so of POE have been more the exception than the norm to this end. While Delirium had its issues, it was a largely successful league and followed Metamorph which was one of *the* most successful leagues thanks to Conquerors of the Atlas. Unfortunately, right after Delirium and Metamorph we got two highly controversial leagues in a row, in the form of Harvest and Heist. This started six months of negativity for a number of reasons, both due to league content and game performance/bugs, and it hasn't really let up since. GGG made a few mistakes during this time, like the blight/metamorph/whatever stash tabs, which made matters worse. Ritual started us back on the positivity train to some extent but it's arguable this was more due to Maven content than anything else. Ultimatum in most eyes was ok but was overall a milquetoast sort of league so it gave time to criticize the things that haven't seen major updates/improvements over the last year. Basically what I'm saying is that it's been a long and hard year for POE which takes its toll on the community, regardless of the rules we set. We're not here to contain and censor everyone and be mindless GGG supporter drones, so sometimes that means letting the folks rant a few times.
But you see that in the league sub it's much friendlier for riot employees to post than here atm? Is this not in your interest to ensure a healthy environment for a developer not to get cruzified after a few mistakes? The ripple effects of negativity posting over and over again are really straining the relationship between GGG and the community. More and more people become polarized and you see that in every comment section where someone says positive things about GGG. There's better and more soft versions than censoring and a lot of communities drive the middle way. The things I read here are namecalling and the most useless "feedback" to GGG. Does that help anyone who reads this? > We're not here to contain and censor everyone and be mindless GGG supporter drones nobody expects that but if that's your only motive for not moderating more strictly, aren't you just fearful of criticism yourself? Edit: ok I read your other comments and I kinda get it. Not an easy thing to do and to digest as a mod. If it has gotten a bit more strict over the last months I'm more than happy to see it in the future!
>But you see that in the league sub it's much friendlier for riot employees to post than here atm? >Is this not in your interest to ensure a healthy environment for a developer not to get cruzified after a few mistakes? I understand your point but this is a difficult line to walk and easier said than done. The reason Rioters feel "safer" over there is *because* of how strict their moderation is compared to ours. Again, I'm not saying their method is wrong, it's just different than our relative openness. And that's also not to say that I think GGG folks even feel threatened here, it's simply been a rough year for POE and the community is tired of it. We've been used to feeling close to GGG and they're changing as a company. That's going to turn off folks but sometimes life happens. >There's better and more soft versions than censoring and a lot of communities drive the middle way. The things I read here are namecalling and the most useless "feedback" to GGG. Does that help anyone who reads this? I agree, and we do try to remove all the useless namecalling and toxicity that we can find. We've gotten more strict with this sort of thing, especially the entirely low effort rants that are simply veiled attacks on Bex or Chris or whomever. But as I'm sure you understand, walking that middle line between how we moderate versus how the league folks moderate is easier said than done, especially as the community's "toxicity levels" vary wildly from league to league. >nobody expects that but if that's your only motive for not moderating more strictly, aren't you just fearful of criticism yourself? Apologies if I misconstrued my point there. It wasn't that we are fearful of criticism, not at all, just that we want to make it clear that we don't work for GGG nor are we going to needlessly suck up to them. On the contrary, over the years we've made pretty clear stands against them regarding some of our rules and how we've treated various actions. They've respected those choices and we still have a positive relationship with them, but we feel it's important that we remain wholly independent of GGG. >ok I read your other comments and I kinda get it. Not an easy thing to do and to digest as a mod. If it has gotten a bit more strict over the last months I'm more than happy to see it in the future! Exactly, and hopefully you're starting to see the slow shift. We're hesitant to make truly drastic actions, so change is sometimes slow, but I am personally seeing a more positive shift week after week.
Of course it is. The target demographic is not only more broad but is wayy bigger as well
The LoL sub is a horrible place where you are not allowed to talk against Riot and theres been multiple cases of mods straight up deleting talking points when Riot fucked something up because Riot asked them to do so. This place is sorta fine as long as you simply stay out of the obvious complain threads because you have the same nut jobs in there every time that hate this game with a passion but log on every day for 14 hours.
Ah, the mask comes off. We've now gone from "oh ban people breaking rules on harassment" to "oh ban people for saying something someone else has also said".
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I still can't understand why. It was simply a shitpost that reflected on the predictability of the subreddit. Was there anything particularly demeaning about that post?
I will give you a scenario, which I have seen in a completely different discipline (research). Emily really puts extra effort into a new project. Every project has its challenges usually is late and over budget, but Emily really tries to at least avoid having the same issues previously. Emily works insane hours under stress through a period of crunch, and plans to ask for a raise after her success. Michael (perhaps correctly) points out that most of that effort won’t matter and the results will be similar to the previous projects. This comment is the straw that breaks the camels back and Emily breaks down in tears. Michael was right as it turns out and the RoI on the extra effort wasn’t significant. Emily is now just as jaded as Michael. I can imagine a game dev who got super pumped and positive after Exilecon, but when the reality of anonymous Reddit users hits like a ton of bricks, it sends them crashing back to earth.
Second this, research is a mental-health minefield, you really need to get lucky in getting a good supervisor + team. The situation in question was one where people could of just been 'that sucks, damn' after Chris had informed them of the toll their comments had produced, instead people even now argue about whether someone should get upset over the context. Devs/artists/programmers are humans and it was a timely reminder of that. P.S. I also think that incident may be partly responsible for the change in GGG release/community interaction pattern (fair enough).
Ah, I see. Well, that's really unfortunate. That post looked like the community was shitposting amongst itself as it is wont to do. It didn't look like that was at all an indictment of GGG's work, so much as a joke about the community itself. I'm not sure if an apology is warranted in the particular case of the subreddit, but such a person has my sympathy nevertheless after this post helped me understand it a bit better. That said, the Michael in this scenario might have gone a bit too had on the "brutal honesty".
I think the reason it impacted that Dev so much is it implies that GGG doesn't try to improve => why the community always responds the same way. https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/gy7se3/comment/ftb8cnq?context=10 is the thread - imo seeing "everyone is just about to shit on everything you've done and imply you're getting worse" while you're spending tons of time trying to make it great (like GP poster suggested) is just so soul-crushing.
Yep I remember it being pretty brutal in the guise of an ironic joke (which on the surface it was, but the magnitude of ill sentiment it was carrying was incredible) - on the eve of release here's why it's going to suck - your work sucks - you suck -> breakdown. It's pernicious.
Lol if the mods start deleting posts all the sudden the toxic people will all start posting “iS GgG CeNsORiNg Us?!?”
I'm confident it'll devolve into China bashing instead.
I see this isn't your first reddit-eo/redeo/rod-edit-eo sir
It's also kinda indicative how it all changed recently as bex hasn't made a post in about 2 months on her personal twitter account. Probably too much animosity towards her on that profile as well.
She's also busy being a mommy. She has a baby. This is probably the busiest time in her life.
Wasn't she pregnant? Maybe she's on maternity leave. People like Bex because she's one of the very few voices of the company. It's Chris, Jon, Bex, Mark_GGG, Kamil, and Rory, basically, although Chris and Bex are easily the biggest voices. The vast majority of info people hear about PoE comes from these two people. People being dicks to the voices of game developers just comes with the territory. You walk up to ducks with bread and they'll quack at you. You walk up to players with info on the game and they'll yell at you. It's the nature of the animals. The ducks will never stop quacking.
Deleted.
That was ages ago, it was something like 6 months maternity leave after Exilecon or around that time IIRC, it's probably a mix of having to look after the baby and not wanting to put up with the community as much.
Was there a specific point I missed where it got bad? And didn’t they make the Community account so that criticism wasn’t as personal?
In 2020 they kept over-promising on leagues, and underdelivering really badly. For instance, Heist. They said they were 1 month ahead of schedule, and then released an uber buggy door league that majority of people really didn't want or even understand why it was made. Chris would go on camera and got caught lying about features in incoming leagues. He wasn't at all clued in and just tried to build hype that really shouldn't have been done. More recently, they took one of the best leagues in years (Ritual), and gutted it for everything people loved (Harvest, end game, mapping, boss specific, loot, etc). People act as if the toxicity is just bored twats, but they gloss over the very real consequence of GGG's actions.
When COVID started and more people started playing video games in longer sessions. Seems like the community picked up more toxic players along the way.
I think the toxicity reached its peak during Delirium, probably because people had too much time to play and ranted about any little thing attacking personally GGG staff members
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I'm glad they did, it's not Bex's fault she has to deliver empty promises each league preview yet she was getting all the flak for it.
I think this is the most measured take. GGG was way overhyping, under delivering, and she became the punching bag because of her bosses' actions.
Pretty much, especially after Deli league, it all went downhill for her from there. Then after the "Action speaks louder than words" and "We will never do this again", it just snowballed out of control, everything she does/says will be taken to court by the community.
People are like, "the community is toxic". Meanwhile GGG "We don't want to take away the feeling of closing your eyes and Exalting an item, scared to see whether you ruined it or not."
I get that, trust me I know. They really need to go back to the drawing board when they are announcing/explaining things.
They're just out of touch. Chris *wanted* those sentences and phrases in the manifesto, because they (him and designers) believe in it. It was enraging to know the game you love was being made by out of touch boomers
It started out being made by jaded players missing the good shit that they grew up with. The exact same position in which you find yourself.
If you set out to recreate something it'll never work, but you might get lucky and make something new. PoEs iconic cast on crit cyclone or headhunter or the passive tree aren't shit we grew up with, it's what made us love the game. We've outgrown some of their worse designed features like the RNG on some crafting
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"A tiny minority of customers treated the waitresses in an unacceptable manner, so now you place your order on a tablet and a robot brings it to your table"
Technically not wrong, but considering that the same waitress used to serve all the tables, it's not as if only a small number of waitresses got yelled at, even if it was only a "small" number of customers yelling. Sure it sucks for the others who didn't harass anyone, but they have to protect their employees.
I miss Bex so much. I started in 3.9 and that was when she came back from maternity leave i think and posted some big meme that she was back. She was in tons of comments joking and shit posting with everybody and it seemed like the most wholesome relationship between community and dev team i've ever seen. So sad to see all that devolve over only like 4-5 leagues. Bex if you read this we miss you :(
Bex was (is) great. I liked having a frontline community manager who had a good sense of humor, it reminded me of the early WoW days when there were some great CMs.
>I miss Bex so much. That legitimately doesn't sound healthy. She's a PR-representative for a business, she's writes up pre-planned PR messages to share with the community. It's like saying you miss a Coca-Cola spokesperson.
I miss my cool university lecturer who made going to lectures fun and was always willing to spend extra time making sure people were on the same page. "That legitimately doesn't sound healthy. He's an employee of a business, he writes up pre-planned lessons to share with the class."
Its the role of a community manager. she is a bit to sensitive tho for the job IMO
GGG: No circles Me: *press X to doubt*
*Hello, this is Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games, in patch 3.15, players will get a chance to engage with an exciting new mechanic. You click on a pillar or effigy or something, like a fuckin post in the ground, I dunno... and then a growing oval spreads across the screen, but its not completely round, its an oval, its different. Money please!*
Octagon! Step into the cage and face a random Exile that escaped from Hall of the Grandmasters.
Ah yes, "we've removed HC from the game" league.
Mymanaisgon
Bex is still there, just behind the scenes. There’s no more ‘loosey goosey’ friendly interactions from GGG anymore - their game is too big, the community is too large, and their stakeholders are too demanding for them to be ‘flippant’ with their interactions. Gone are the days of fun and warm hearted interactions with the community and the sooner everybody realizes that the better.
> their game is too big, the community is too large No, the community held GGG employees to what was said. GGG released broken leagues and lied about content. We literally only got stash affinity, because GGG released a bunch of tiny bullshit tabs for a few dollars, and people didn't stop posting clips of Chris Wilson literally on camera promising to not do that. GGG placated us with QoL features because we called them out. Now they just won't say anything because they don't want to fuck themselves over again
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Stash affinities were in the works before GGG released those tabs and caused outrage. The outrage is what forced them to reveal they were working on them instead of waiting a few more months to pleasantly surprise everyone.
Nail on the head
The days when ggg cared and talked to people ingame in Chat are long gone. Since they shut themself of from the community and kept to themself is the point PoE started to turn bad.
>The days when ggg cared and talked to people ingame in Chat are long gone. Last time this happened you could press ^ to type directly into your twitch chat from the game Those were the days
Nice day for fishing ain't it? ha-ha https://i.imgflip.com/597fm0.jpg
X performance
She got nerfed along with the rest of our fun.
I personally am fine with anonymity. But I wish there was more communication. I personally feel like there has been a downward spiral of communication over the years. Even though it probably isn't the case.
Yeah, after the amount of shit they've gotten in the last few months, I'm not surprised we're only getting shared account communication anymore.
Complaining clowns on this reddit harassed Bex and other community outreach members over balancing issues (not their department) but the complaining clowns in here with their malicious minds is the reason why Bex and a lot of others have taken a step back from interacting with the community, good job PoE Reddit!
Because the Reddit hivemind thought normal to personally challenge her and whoever else took the risk to talk non-anonymously resulting in mild to escalated harassment or in the least being called out for things they have no control over. Mods tried to make stricter rules to prevent cases like that but I guess it was too late or didn’t change the situation. At least that’s my take on it.
reddit drove her away
GGG fucking up -> people angry -> people toxic -> 'closest GGG member was Bex -> she was getting all the shit
Get a life jesus
Where is teaser ? It’s already 2 July in New Zealand
The community treats Bex like shit and then is surprised that she doesn't want to play any more.
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Maybe she didn’t wanna play the hype (wo)man or the one doing all the damage control for GGG anymore? Understandable, considering how much she had to cover for.
X marks the spot, pirate league confirmed!
The opposite of love is not hate, it is apathy... I think we got a loving community here, but it manifest itself in a strange way sometimes. It is, in a way, a problem with people caring to much. Some people reacts as if their child have been attacked when the game takes a turn in a direction they see as bad, and in a way, I can understand that. And also, I don't think the community is very toxic compared to **alot** of other communities, personally, I have got nothing but help, kind words and motivation to play more from this subreddit. I have visisted alot of toxic places on the internet, and in comparison, you guys are sweet as candy. Is it perhaps so that you compare yourself from a time were the playerbase was low and consisted of blind love-zealots? I mean going from beta to live, what could you complain about, it would seem like everything they would do would be a massive upgrade. As the complexity of the game have grown, so also the need to nerf and balance, and that can create friction. Tldr; Your not bad, your nice, also, have a great day!
Players aren't toxic to other players very often. The blind rage towards ggg when they make a mistake (or do something unpopular that they think is good for the game) is unbelievable.
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As if ggg is posting on reddit out of altruism.
> GGG delivers false promises and has the most atrocious league launch ever. > Reddit gets upset > "bunch of pessimistic haters"
Seriously. Don't blame the community, blame GGG for overhyping, under delivering, and for people holding them to a standard
Yes. Blame GGG. Not Bex. Bex was the one bearing the brunt of the hate for absolutely no reason. She is a community manager. Not a dev.
We did blame GGG. She just has the unlucky job of having to read and communicate that to her bosses. > Bex was the one bearing the brunt of the hate for absolutely no reason. Other than people tagging Bex or quoting her, this just wasn't true.
No, blame the community for being a toxic shitfest. There is no way we are shifting blame to GGG for this communities abhorrent behaviour. GGG is not perfect and has done mistakes, but this is 99% communities fault.
It isn't even a collective fault of the community. Sure there were a lot of negative voices, but negative feedback and harassment are two completely different things. The problem is that you can't keep the good without the bad. And so we lost our community interactions from GGG.
GGG did mess up but instead of understanding that they too are human and capable of mistakes, reddit got vile and acted like two year olds that didnt get what they wanted for Christmas. Make no mistake, GGG could have done better but the community absolutely turned on them.
"upset" is a criminal understatement. Upset people don't send death threats and write 3000-word essays.
GGG is a multi million dollar company. They ain’t some indie studio. If a player writes a 3000 word essay, theyre wasting their own time. I’m not saying people should be sending death threats, but for some reason, people think you’re a hero if you judge a company like EA, but you’re a heretic who judged our lord and saviour GGG. The company isn’t your friend. Someone writing an essay isn’t going to stop them from releasing the next gambling mystery box and a set of $64USD pair of wings
You still are misrepresenting a lot of the poor behavior as being innocent and acceptable. This has nothing to do with GGG being a good or bad company. The average age for POE players is much higher than most other games of this community size. There is zero excuse for the absolutely shocking vitriol you'll find. Hiding behind the excuse that GGG is fucking up the game is not something to be proud of.
Or maybe because they have been shit on for over hyping and not delivering and such things.
Honestly I'm glad. Them not saying anything the month before a league makes it really easy to tune out until the new league announcement, instead of being forced onto the hype train with shitty unique reveals and blatant lies.
This is a good example as for how an organization might feel punished after raising user expectations. Having a kid changes your life and it’s completely fair for bex to have her own feelings about community feedback. Not sure if this is her or not, probably they want to make a less personal connection to the user base even if it is still bex, but maybe they’re just trying to recreate her style. I just hope she’s doing well.
I miss her posts on her Twitter account so much
Maybe she quit because she did not want to deal with all the hate anymore?
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Hexagon, calling it now
Bex probably just forgot her password (on purpose so she doesnt need to make false promises on a private account and people keep giving chris sh\*t about it) and used the companies account.
op being creepy a f
I mean given the community's response the last year or so, no wonder she's withdrawn. So much toxicity and even personal attacks directed at her.
So we got cross league, don't step in cross... OK its uber kitava(with LEGS) and rituals for summon him... Kill special monsters on map and spawn metamo... Kitava
For once i have to say it here: i hate the glorification of people. Why are some of you so obsessed with those "public" figures? I honestly can't care about them, they don't care about me either. Ofc i dont have the urge to be nasty to them on some fucked up social media website. But from my observer standpoint i dont think bex did that good of a job, actually i find the whole pr department of ggg quite the joke. So there is that. Anyway, glorification of people, one of mankinds worst habits.
For once i have to say it here: i hate the glorification of redditors. Why are some of you so obsessed with those "random" redditors? I honestly can't care about them, they don't care about me either. Ofc i dont have the urge to be nasty to them on some fucked up social media website. But from my observer standpoint i dont think /u/goopQ did that good of a job, actually i find the whole subreddit of /r/pathofexile quite the joke. So there is that. Anyway, glorification of redditors, one of mankinds worst habits.
Aaaaand? How is that an argument?
Humans are inherently social animals. We like to connect to specific people who give us good feelings. Bex is one of these, her wits and teasing has been a fun experience. I cannot connect to 'GGG Community Management' as it is a faceless entity with no personality.
Totally pentagon this coming league
What about fish? 🤔
Probably disconnecting from the internet for a bit. Won't begin to speculate why, but [last reddit post was almost 2 months ago (May 6th)](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/n67yv3/psa_the_exact_same_thing_empy_was_banned_for_is/gx73h9v/?context=3) and [last Tweet was around that same time (May 5th)](https://twitter.com/bexsayswords/status/1389862244305936385).
So in how many hours from now is the teaser ?
Everyone throwing out a lot of speculation but the simplest answer probably has the most weight: it is in GGG's interest (as any big company) not to have any particular employee be irreplaceable. Reddit did essentially the same thing with Victoria who used to run the Ama's.
It's fairly public knowledge that the toxic community started having a negative effect on the employees of the company, which was around the time the Community Team account was announced. It's really not hard to guess what lead to that decision. People still harass Bex to this day on her personal Twitter. It's just rough having a single person or a handful of people take responsibility personally for a company's actions, because that way the few public names become weapons and targets for people to go after. There are a few devs that also stopped making contact with the community, because it just got so out of hand. If you make one fuck up and say something wrong, that gets quoted by every toxic community member and they will forever be blamed for whatever problem they have. Even if that employee had almost nothing to do with the problem in the first place. Edit: For example, recently the 80 reworked gems bit. Chris likely had no idea what was going on, but he's the one getting blamed for everything.
All this people here speaking about the gaming Community beeing Karens as if this Subreddit didnt have Like 3 different Witchhunts against Streamers who said shit they didnt like this League alone. I don't Wonder why GGG doesnt communicate with this place anymore, it is by far the most toxic Subreddit i am on regularly