The dangerously big influence of reddit

This has bothered me for a long time now. I think GGG trusts Reddit way too much when it comes to balance decisions without considering that most of the people there have never reached lvl 90 and their only goal is to kill Shaper and then quit 2 weeks into the league to start crying about how easy the game is.

Reddit is a vocal minority. People who play the game won't go to reddit and start complaining about this and that, they just play the game. On the other hand all the salty people who don't even play anymore cry for weeks and weeks until they reach their goal of messing stuff up and then? They quit again after 2 weeks into the new league and do the same thing over and over again.

Reddit mods have a strict moderation and remove anything that criticizes their sub and balance decisions while the vocal minority keeps downvoting posts that don't get deleted leading to a full censorship of the sub and dictatorship of people who barely play the game and are just looking for drama.

It's an ARPG, it requires time investment. It's unhealthy to balance the game around people who barely play, in the same way it's unhealthy to balance around people who keep grinding to 100. After all, weren't games supposed to be fun? Why try to make it extremely hard, where's the fun in that?

Also, keep in mind that the game had the biggest growth starting in 2.0 when the game started to powercreep. Since most of the people (including me) started playing after 2.0 they are used to a fast-paced PoE. What are they going to think of 3.0? I don't think they'll have a positive opinion of it but then again that's just a wild guess.

Then there's some popular streamers who also keep saying how PoE would be too easy but ironically some of them die every day. Nevertheless they reach their goal of making their viewers parrot what they say on Reddit and start drama.

They act confident in what they say even if their "facts" are completely wrong and people follow like sheep and upvote those kind of posts because they don't know better themselves.

The constant nerfs just keep reducing build diversity and do more harm than good. In my opinion the reason the game grew so much the past leagues is the constant powercreep and appeal to average gamers with jobs and real lives.

Now, I'm not saying you should faceroll everything with minimum investment, no. But at a certain point of no-lifing in a league you should be able to make godlike builds which ultimately is the goal of ARPGs and the reason why people keep investing time into games of this genre. And the more godlike builds there are at a high currency investment barrier the more people will be interested in investing time and reaching those goals. Ultimately it's the people who keep playing the league after 2 weeks who keep the economy and trading alive, what will happen when they are gone because they have nothing to play?

My point is, most of the time it's the unhappy vocal minority that keeps whining on reddit, while the rest just plays the game and minds their own business and don't even realize the game they're playing is being sabotaged by a few unhappy people.

who's reddit?

I've seen far more balance police active in these forums than on Reddit tbh but what make you think that any of them do actually have any influence on balance?

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RandallPOE wrote:

I've seen far more balance police active in these forums than on Reddit tbh but what make you think that any of them do actually have any influence on balance?

The past has shown that reddit has am immense influence on the game's balance.

After all, it has a voting system and it sounds like a good idea to consider opinions on there but it turned out not to be as straight forward as it sounds since there is too much manipulation going on and inherently satisfied people don't go around raging on forums.

I'm on the fence on siding with either you or the next person to say game is too easy...how many upvotes you got doe?

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eXecut1on wrote:

The past has shown that reddit has am immense influence on the game's balance.

Where? When?

I'm very happy to be proven wrong on this. But as far as I know the evidence amounts to:

1. Common reddit suggestions for balance and GGG's actual balance changes are often similar.
2. GGG's eye for balance is not very good.

I don't think either of those can be disputed, but they don't imply any sort of causative relationship. I'm also sure you could make exactly the same case replacing reddit with the official forums. What am I missing?

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eXecut1on wrote:

Then there's some popular streamers who also keep saying how PoE would be too easy but ironically some of them die every day. Nevertheless they reach their goal of making their viewers parrot what they say on Reddit and start drama.

And then there are streamers and their circle of special needs persons who blames every decision from ggg onto minorities.

Just play the game. Support if you are happy with what you get, don't support otherwise.

My personal opinion is that reddit suffers from hivemind mentality, a few select people will just complain about something being overpowered to the point where everyone else joins in, which spirals continuously until it becomes the common opinion even against people's actual best interests to which GGG sees, and I think it would be silly to think that GGG doesn't take into consideration the 'common opinion' portrayed by sometimes painful reddit comments.

Compared to other subreddits I've honestly never seen a playerbase whine quite nearly as much as the path of exile one, I'm not even sure why because this isn't a PvP game in which a playerbase would want close to perfect balance in order to feel like they're playing against people and not the game, this is a game where enjoyment is supposed to be taken from vapourising monsters and collecting loot and I personally find it odd at which the level people escalate their complaining and bitching in terms of balance in a game where I'd argue balance should be an afterthought behind considerations of fun

For the purpose of expanding this threads validity, can someone also list me all the changes that were solely influenced by reddit and afterwards implemented ingame because of that?

I reckon it will give a firmer foothold to thread op claims. I can't think of any so far, but that is due to my memory defects.

Reddit? A place where the most upvoted threads are memes and people do not read posts longer than three sentences? Reddit where housewife that needs a fucking manual to make a toast can have an opinion an a theory of strings? That reddit?