GGG's Lead Developer addresses the PoE community about the latest league.

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

GGG just focusing on fixing bugs rather than repairing their relationship with the community with PR statements is probably the best route to go right now.

You know, given how honed their reddit game is, I don't see the two as mutually exclusive. And certainly, we've seen them both fix bugs aggressively *and* maintain a healthy relationship with the reddit community simultaneously for years. If anything, that's sort of what GGG are famous for, especially compared to other developers who seem to think a cone of silence is code for 'we are too busy being devs to bother with PR. So...what changed?

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You know, given how honed their reddit game is, I don't see the two as mutually exclusive. And certainly, we've seen them both fix bugs aggressively *and* maintain a healthy relationship with the reddit community simultaneously for years. If anything, that's sort of what GGG are famous for, especially compared to other developers who seem to think a cone of silence is code for 'we are too busy being devs to bother with PR. So...what changed?

This is just my personal opinion, but I don't feel like this league really sucked enough despite its numerous problems to justify a personal apology from Chris, especially when they do give out previews of what upcoming patches and planned improvements will hold to address these issues.

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

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You know, given how honed their reddit game is, I don't see the two as mutually exclusive. And certainly, we've seen them both fix bugs aggressively *and* maintain a healthy relationship with the reddit community simultaneously for years. If anything, that's sort of what GGG are famous for, especially compared to other developers who seem to think a cone of silence is code for 'we are too busy being devs to bother with PR. So...what changed?

This is just my personal opinion, but I don't feel like this league really sucked enough despite its numerous problems to justify a personal apology from Chris, especially when they do give out previews of what upcoming patches and planned improvements will hold to address these issues.

Oh no, I didn't mean to imply that level of extreme crowd control. But you did say 'repair the relationship' so I figured there's some sort of...reassurance lacking. Surely that can be provided by the professional reassurance application team without hindering the bug killing team. Not sure what the 1000 hours team is up to though.

I probably should mean to say that PR statement might not be the best way to repair the trust between GGG and the community, if said PR statement just comes off as containing hollow promises and what seems like an apology for things that they've already apologized for that still remain problems with the game.

Maybe the game is going in the shitter, and you might think that if you read these forums. I don't see it. It's a game, and at the core it's still fun. People are jumping on the hate wagon for some social reason.

It's not that GGG is faultless. It's that people seem to be blowing these faults way out of proportion. They don't like something, so they look for all the things they can hate and start posting about them.

People with reasonable expectations for a game tend to think "I'm not going to post in that mass of hate". So it looks like there's a huge problem when there isn't.

GGG is making their game. People are playing it. People are still supporting. The forum gives the impression that everything is going to shit. It's not.

We know that the latest launch and the following weeks were severely subpar. They also know this. There's nothing they could say, really. If they would hint towards lockdown, some people in here would tear them apart because "some other company in some other country is doing fine".

If you feel like they owe you some kind of appology or explanation, you're taking it too personal.

Being "sub par" right now is pretty dang good. Most businesses around here are laying off people and shuttering their doors. Many wont return to normal.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

You know, given how honed their reddit game is, I don't see the two as mutually exclusive. And certainly, we've seen them both fix bugs aggressively *and* maintain a healthy relationship with the reddit community simultaneously for years. If anything, that's sort of what GGG are famous for

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Maybe the game is going in the shitter, and you might think that if you read these forums. I don't see it. It's a game, and at the core it's still fun. People are jumping on the hate wagon for some social reason.

It's not that GGG is faultless. It's that people seem to be blowing these faults way out of proportion. They don't like something, so they look for all the things they can hate and start posting about them.

People with reasonable expectations for a game tend to think "I'm not going to post in that mass of hate". So it looks like there's a huge problem when there isn't.

GGG is making their game. People are playing it. People are still supporting. The forum gives the impression that everything is going to shit. It's not.

So I've been involved in...uh...'discussions' with people on Reddit these past few days and I think I have something worth adding to both of these posts. First, for broad context:

1. There have been a lot of bugs this league ranging from small to 'my grand heists crash every time'. As Shags says, we have no way of knowing how many people each bug affects - but we might be tempted to surmise, based on player retention counts after 1/2 weeks that the bugs weren't enough to get people to stop playing the game in any sort of unusually large numbers.

2. Reddit is full of bug reports the first week of every league.

3. GGG significantly changed how the league worked or rewarded you 4 times in 10 days.

4. GGG said during one of their news posts that 'the launch of Heist went well with just a few bug fixes and tweaks needed'

5. Many of these patches seemed to break something else. This week's patch broke Einhar and knockback mechanics for some people for some amount of time, and also reintroduced old, 'fixed' bugs like Tullina in Agility missions. This leads to the justified frustration of bug-fix-whack-a-mole that the devs are playing with a dinner sized plate of spaghetti code of their own making.

6. Bex recently went on vacation for a week or two and immediately Reddit started accusing GGG of 'silence' and 'not caring' about 'the most broken and buggy league ever'.

7. Reddit mods recently imposed tighter restrictions on criticizing GGG employees by name, even if the criticism is in meme format or a joke. This was on the heels of Chris mentioning that one of the posts made one of their employees break down and cry.

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So, fast forward. Bex comes back from vacation. Reddit is mad about everything. Heists are boring, unrewarding, buggy, unplayable, they're dying to one shots, they're dying to not one shots, the rogues don't work, allies cannot die is unfair. They're still mad about stash tabs and the upcoming tab affinity being an unethical cash grab. Loot boxes (a voluntary transaction between adults in which you know your odds upfront) are 'unethical gambling forced (forced!) on us by greedy capitalists and communist China'. Also the mtx are way overpriced and Reddit would price them better and make more money.

All alternate quality skill gems are garbage, but also some are bugged either in tooltip or gameplay. The Heist unique maps and bosses, put into the game 15 days post launch b/c they weren't ready yet, are released and, of course, buggy. Players run hundreds of maps without seeing a smugglers cache (source of the unique contracts). GGG said working as intended. That didn't go over great.

GGGs code sucks and so does their project cycle, Reddit would do it a lot better.

Maps are empty. Heist is standard, we want Harvest back. Harvest was also standard mode with empty maps, we want Delirium back.

Keep in mind, these are the remaining criticisms after two weeks of fixes.

A user makes this thread 3.5 days ago:

"I'd love to have a manifesto/comment on technical debt and what GGGs plans are going forward to address community concerns."

Bex responded



Keen Redditors with an operational memory pointed out that they have said the same thing at least 3 times in the past after buggy/poorly implemented league launches. (perfectly fair point imo).

Bex responded to another person in the thread:



While this second post garnered plenty of 'updoots' and empathy(more on this later) it spawned a popular counter position - that this second post - the one in the second spoiler - was victim blaming the community. Remember the context to start this post.

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To get to Charan's post, I think it's fair to say that GGG may no longer have a healthy relationship with Reddit. I think they are posting there less, and will continue to post less for reasons that should be clear if you took the time to read my short novel. The state of the subreddit is quite hostile at this point, in some ways justified, others not. Adding evidence to my prediction is that Bex said on twitter they may not do spoilers for the December league. I imagine they're tired of the community holding them to 100% delivery of stuff that's still in alpha testing (again you can quibble about who's fault this is, GGG for the 13 week cycle and needing to hype players to return, or the playerbase for being drooling idiots).

And I don't know to what extent their Reddit game is honed anymore. Maybe disengaging from vitriol is evidence in and of itself that their game is as sharp as ever.

The reddit got so toxic that the mods had to crackdown on the vitriol. Think about that. And now you see passive-aggressive posts there echoing the Bex scenario I talked about earlier where the Reddit community is the real victim, the subreddit has never been toxic, and the real toxicity is how greedy GGG constantly slaps the playerbase in the face.

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To reflect on Shags post, my analysis is that Heist and the commotion caused is an effect of empathy. Weird right? But I think players are demonstrably more empathetic toward each other than GGG at this point - kind of an us-against-them developing. So when people post bug reports, players who never even experienced that bug chalk it up in their mental ledger of 'GGG bad, players abused' and slam that upvote button. So it looks like these bugs are affecting tons of people. That thread has 3k upvotes! This must be serious! When it may not be that widespread.

In concert with the raw number of bugs this league and the fact that fixing them seemed to spawn more, I can definitely see the perception that this is the most shoddy release to date in terms of technical quality and QA.

Who is more right really comes down to a truth we may never know - was GGG right when they said that Heist was a successful league launch that need a normal amount of post-launch fixes? Or is reddit correct when they call Heist the buggiest thing ever released?

I can tell you that I had only 2 crashes this league, and among Heist things not working, I found them easy to avoid. (Ex, Tullina in Agility doesn't work, just use Karst instead).

I can also tell you that I have friends who are very much on Reddits side and, at minimum are done spending money, and are considering quitting the game over a combination of Heist bugs and delayed content (the unique bosses/maps).

Thanks for the read. I don't even go to reddit anymore since they changed format a month or so ago. Glad to see it was a good choice.

Give a little and they just want more. Past few leagues have shown this to be true of some vocal minority Reddit community members. Tell them to get over it but more likely you'll just get voted down.