The dangerously big influence of reddit

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Cataca wrote:

You are kidding yourself if you think any metric on this forums are going to change anythiong.

I am not about forums at all.
I am about internal statistics from players, collected by servers.

I.e. average map completion time with skill A : 1.30, with skill B : 2.30, etc.

Blizzard balances around internal statistics? is that why d3 was so terrible and unbalanced? lul

I rather have a company balance and listen to the feedback of its players (the people actually playing their game and paying their bills). Reddit is a good tool to get instant feedback from the community.

Regardless of whether people will accept or not that 3rd party sites / entities have a major influence on information / direction of a game, there has been a clear change behavior when it comes to gaming information being pushed out of internal circles and "leased out" to external ones.

When developers / community managers / etc. start posting solely or generally "most of the time" on 3rd party platforms then you have the start of a big problem. This is either a means of avoiding your playerbase and/or avoiding blame for something ( We posted it, not our fault you didn't see it on www.nobodygoeshere.com ), or they have lost control of their own platform to such a degree that they feel inclined to "start over" with a new / fresh clientele.

With the advent / rise of social media this has become much more apparent, where companies will offload all information into a single tweet, which both provides exactly no real context and no means of adequate discussion in response.

For example, Blizzard use to communicate regularly ( for Blizzard... ) on their own forums, but now they release information on twitter..in a dozen different accounts. If they feel compelled to say more than 4 words..they'll do so on a fan site Diablofans. You can blame "player toxicity" all you want ..but anyone with a customer service job could tell you the forums are far tamer than a face to face confrontation with a dissatisfied customer in returns ( like Walmart ). Besides that, it still doesn't dismiss that they actively chose not to provide information ( not conversation ) on their own platform. And with the prominence of fan sites ...they don't feel compelled to either, when a site like Diablofans can datamine ( and often have misinformation ) material days in advance. Blizzard could communicate these changes themselves...but they've become complacent / lethargic.

It's gotten so bad that the only person campaigning for a positive spin on what they do is a single "MVP", who as far they say, are not compensated by Blizzard for their work. They regularly get shat on ....because, well, they blatantly shill, lie, and dismiss comments; there's still no real conversation.

To GGG's defense, they do provide a news feed pretty regularly on their front page of the site, as well as having it set in the forums for discussion. You could only ever find something like that for Blizzard in a "blog Post" ..and the comments would regularly get completely cleared out if they were not all entirely positive. GGG has their own issues, like every company, so there's an argument to be made about the relativism and context of it.

Getting back to the initial point though, companies in general are transitioning ( or are being funneled into, because of "feelings" or marketing strategies ) into a very hands-off approach to information gathering and presentation. Instead relying on fans to do all the work for them, because lets face it, fans will devote their own money and time to do just that. This works no better than for marketing ..where you can spit out a single word on twitter and have the "hype train" build up instantly. And if it ever ended up as bad pr ...you have an abundance of fans who will do all of the pr management for you by being overly protective of the brand.

Hell, we can see that already with the post on here about "Reddit going crazy over a leaked belt screenshot from 3.0 beta"; for better or for worse.

To play devils advocate though for a split second...who here really expects a good conversation about something on these forums? In every single post made by a GGG staff member ( news posts prominently ) ...the first page or two is immediately filled with 1-4 word praises. Even in the 2 week event feedback thread ....people are just spouting out 1 word answers. Just saying "beyond", for example, is not a compelling chunk of feedback or thought. If they asked for feedback on a new ES belt and people just replied with "Cool" "Good Work" "Sexy" etc. it wouldn't help gauge whether the item had any issues or not.

And that comes down to a fundamental problem with their forum policies / communication environment. They garnish this kind of communication because it makes them feel better about their MTX posts ( and choices in general ) ..but it does absolutely nothing towards directing the game itself.

And then you get comments like this:

"

"You are kidding yourself if you think any metric on this forums are going to change anythiong.

1-20 pages on this thread? Who can quantify serious responses, one by one, with differin opinions?

You are seriously overestimating your voice. Serisouily overestimating the entire forums in fact. Why would GGG ever take any feedback of the complete mess they call a forum, if they have something that can easily tell them popular opinion.

Your feedback? Completely irrelevant, in the masses."

....and people wonder why constructive criticism / conversation has been systematically dying out for years. And why gaming companies don't feel compelled to listen very well ( or at all ) to their playerbase, when there's so much in-fighting for no logical reason other than fanboism / identity politics.

My problem with reddit is there's no real accountability, and you have no idea when the last time people there actually played the game. It's so easy to follow game communities and have updates from them pop up in your feed that you can start commenting on a post with an opinion of a game you haven't played in months, and then the developers take action based on those comments

I imagine developers like reddit for that reason though. It's easy to create an account, contact people, easy to look through the forum, and reddit is actually easy to use on your phone unlike this trip. But that ease of use makes it easier for people who know nothing about the game or who've played it in forever to get an opinion that changes a developer's mind

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Splaff wrote:

My personal opinion is that reddit suffers from hivemind mentality[...]

Don't worry, that's 100% accurate and it's the reason you can't take them seriously.

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TriniGamer wrote:

reddit is obviously superior since it has the down votes and upvotes.

Everything should be taken from reddit and implemented that is the onlyway to know for sure if something is good or not since the community votes on it.

For example thanks to reddit we don't have to play this crap 3 times on 3 difficulty just to try out a new build on a new character

Not sure if sarcasm.

9gag and facebook also have "upvotes". Go check which one's tend to be upvoted most of the time,then come back and share your opinion on whether humanity must be destroyed or not.

Fans in most of the time have no clue how to make a game,most of them just think about what they prefer and ignore the consequences on a massive scale. Upvotes in this case should be considered carefully and the developer need to be careful how and if they are to implement some of the ideas/feedback.

Good companies make good games,not their fans.

I second Kasapnica in all he said!

Plus, GGG has statistics from the players, so they can always check their stats to see if something on reddit, 9gag, facebook [Removed by Support] is true, ya know?

This discussion to me is pointless.

all I see on the forums is people whining while on reddit i see more useful stuff actually
So I dont care about ,,reddit's influence"

and btw anyone can join reddit if u want to ,,make a difference"

Seeing as now most of the mediocre builds are faster than the set in stone sets of d3 which appeals way more to casuals than PoE, I think the game is in a state where something had to be done to shake things up, which is exactly what they did.

Removing vaal pact would've been a better solution to slow everyone down and I don't necessarily agree with the direction of absolutely shitting on es but I still think it was warranted.

Personally I think if they keep Vaal pact in the game they need to gut vinktar because the two existing together creates the most op go to combo in the game. Which honestly seems way more a problem then life vs es especially when considering the new life rolls on 3.0.

We had extremely OP builds before but you had to invest lots of time and currency into making them work. Now there are any number of 5ex max builds that can smash all but the hardest of maps and bosses.

I still think the worst decision that ggg made was buffing T1 drop rates, then later letting something like the skyforths abomination exist. Yet as it stands it's the only thing that closely resembles the old feeling of T1 rarity. ( There are rarer things sure but the way to obtain them is roundabout and not as straight forward as just mapping).

I have a full time job and commitments outside of Poe and still think the game is going into too much of a casual friendly zone at the sacrifice of things that make it fun for the more dedicated no lifers/hardcore crowd.

As a quick example before buffs to droprate and clear across the board through ascendancy, I had a shavs drop. it was so amazing how insane that was for me the feeling the rush and excitement, it was crazy. At the time they were going for 35-40 ex, now you get one and the most expensive they are the whole league is 7-10 at the start and quickly down to 6 or less. Fuck my brother had two drip in the same day and one the league before during perandus, and another in a week race.

Just because "sheep" or other people don't like the way things are going doesn't mean it's right or wrong, most people are speaking from a place of earnestness when they complain about power creep, if the game gets any faster it'll be so far from what the original crowd found fun. Keeping it where it is and toning it down a bit when it gets out of hand is the best way to please both crowds.

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Zangetas wrote:

all I see on the forums is people whining while on reddit i see more useful stuff actually
So I dont care about ,,reddit's influence"

and btw anyone can join reddit if u want to ,,make a difference"

That's just because reddit was designed to be able to shun dissenting opinions with downvotes while the forum has no way to censor like that, unless the mods discover a power trip and want to ban everyone who say the game isn't perfect