Streamer priority confirmed. PoE is free to play, so play it for free, but Boycott GGG.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

scoring a PS5 almost at random

I thought those things were extinct. I've only read about them in articles. Is it worth all the craze?

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Adrenicrome wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

scoring a PS5 almost at random

I thought those things were extinct. I've only read about them in articles. Is it worth all the craze?

I got *stupid* lucky. Was out (rare event!) buying mum's mothers day gift (a switch) and they had just gotten 20 ps5s in that morning. They were gone in a few hours, and no more due for near 2 months.

And I dunno if it's worth the craze. Covid and sony really mucked it up, but I have been a ps owner since Squaresoft made the jump (so ps1) and the 5 is easily the most impressive model, relatively speaking. The controller seems to want to sit in my hands. I only have 1 ps5 game (demons souls) but honestly its the performance jump of older ps4 games that really justifies the upgrade. What the 5 does is basically make ps4 games run at a respectable but not cutting edge PC level. But let's be clear: PCs will always be ten steps ahead of any console, by nature of their malleability...if you can afford to ride that wave. I've been enjoying my pc break, playing Elite and The Division and MHW on the couch, but it is all distinctly 'casual' compared to pc gaming.

So, worth it? If you have a solid ps4 catalogue and are sick of the engine noise and want to play your games at a constant 60fps? Absolutely. Otherwise...stick with whatever works for you. :)
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Back on topic: ...eh, go read the OP. :)

Normally my pride doesn't allow for self bumping but for once it's not my pride on display here. Or indeed my hubris.

And just because there may be nothing left to add doesn't mean what's been said should be forgotten or remain unseen. Or be buried by the convenience of a faulty simulacrum of democracy.

This isn't Reddit, after all.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Normally my pride doesn't allow for self bumping but for once it's not my pride on display here. Or indeed my hubris.

And just because there may be nothing left to add doesn't mean what's been said should be forgotten or remain unseen. Or be buried by the convenience of a faulty simulacrum of democracy.

This isn't Reddit, after all.

Actually there is nice receipt, if you think about supporting, but dunno, so let the game itself decide worth it or no.

Like this:

When youre close do done league and/or just have spare exalts, you can

1. Get a base you like, like any.
2. Roll 1-2 T1 mods you like on it.
3. Slam to T1-2 with regal.

And then..

4. Close your eyes and let use 3-4 exalts on the rest mods so game desides..

If it will be t1-t2 those mods and item will be useful.. voila, happy to support this amazing game! If no, then no ofc. All working as intended!

Can try xD
This is to all whos on the fence :)

Even if GGG does not give explicit privileges to streamers, the current mtx community polls also reminds us that streamers basically control any community-driven event that GGG may run from here on out.

I am not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, it feels instinctively wrong to me. On the other, I couldn't rationalise against myself why streamers shouldn't be allowed to rally their followers to drive community decisions according to their preferences.

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Jerle wrote:

Even if GGG does not give explicit privileges to streamers, the current mtx community polls also reminds us that streamers basically control any community-driven event that GGG may run from here on out.

I am not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, it feels instinctively wrong to me. On the other, I couldn't rationalise against myself why streamers shouldn't be allowed to rally their followers to drive community decisions according to their preferences.

This is an interesting conundrum. For a start though, that 'even if' is moot; they did and they do. That's just good business, provided it doesn't rile up enough small-time supporters to make a difference (as apparently it didn't).

So it is wrong, yes. And I'll tell you exactly why:

'Community-driven event that GGG may run' is a ridiculous concept, because 'driven' and 'run' are virtually synonymous in context. Either the community is driving/running the event (e.g. private leagues, streamer-organised races, charity drives) OR GGG are driving/running the event (e.g. flashback leagues, race seasons, survey-based item/mtx design). If you, as a company, are running community events that are overwhelmingly influenced and controlled by a few factions of players or, worse, individuals with sufficient clout, you have fucked up. The veneer of the democracy has become too thin to ignore and your supposed target, any given player, won't bother participating. What should have been an inclusive event has become an exclusive one. Participation gives way to observation. I suppose for a game so reliant on people watching other people play it, that makes sense.

So a community event facilitated or organised by GGG? That makes a little more sense. But 'run'? What that word does (and it's really important that it's the one you chose, because it's the correct one for what's happened here) is clarify how weak GGG's position has become in terms of streamer influence. But this is nothing new: there are sacred cows in the game the slaughter of which would drive a significant number of players away. 'The player is the boss' was one of the most subtly horrifying things Chris has ever said. It appeals on a surface level, but once you realise 'the player' is in fact NOT any given player but instead a certain type of player, what sounds like happy democracy starts to look a lot more like oligarchy. It's not even a meritocracy: some of the absolute best players of the game were virtually unknown until they also became streamers.

For what it's worth, I don't think the mtx thing was entirely dominated by streamer influence; I don't believe GGG has reached the point of, say, K-pop stanning where skewing the voting process is a declaration of devotion. The result didn't surprise me at all.

edit: I just checked. Okay, well...shit. I thought currency had it in the bag. I'm not interested in witch-hunts or finger-pointing but you and a few others dropped a streamer's name. Even if there's proof that's what happened, it's perfectly legitimate, as you said. No reason not to allow that.

...The problem lies with letting it get this far. I mean, if players are fine with streamer access privilege on launch day, then shit, streamer-dictated community voting events is small fucking potatoes in comparison. See what I mean when I say how important it is that someone, anyone, points out the danger of getting complacent with these little 'transgressions'? They erode the community's ability to resist future examples of unfairness, ESPECIALLY when those future examples aren't quite as 'bad' as what happened.

In other words, events such as the streamer priority queue raised the bar for what's acceptable in terms of GGG kow-towing to streamers and treating its average players like shit so high, that anything under it is a hand-wave of 'whatever, at least it wasn't that'. It's like punching someone once a day, just once, no explanation or reason. It won't take long before a slap or a mere shove would seem like a mercy, like a gift, or at the very least like an improvement.

This distortion of 'normal' is classic abusive behaviour.

And that's why you feel it's wrong, Jerle. Because it would seem a lot more wrong to others if they hadn't already accepted it as normal, if they weren't already so invested that they can come up with their own explanations for why things are the way they are.

I am not against community-driven events. I'm not against company-driven events with community input. I think these things are a great idea. But I am 100% against their usage to bolster an already compromised relationship, to reinforce an illusion of agency in the Average Player.

Because from that angle, a company-driven event (i.e. vote on your new mtx!) with community input (i.e. streamer input) looks a lot less like fun and a little more like propaganda, with the agenda being: hey look, Average Player, we're still listening to you! We still care what you think!

And the really sad part is I don't think Average Player even cares if that's true or not anymore. They don't care that when the game is inaccessible to them, it's accessible to certain faux-celebrities, their girlfriends, their cronies, their pets...as long as the game works for them (most of the time). I don't blame them for this: I feel the same way about most other things. But only because I'm fairly sure there's always someone who cares a little more and is saying what they feel needs to be said when something beyond the player's experience goes awry and the consequences of that aren't immediately apparent. That someone is usually a big supporter (investment, after all), a long-time participant who was there 'from the start', give or take. Who has tried, time and again, to justify to themselves why these changes were inevitable, why they're good for the company, the community...but eventually has to face reality that it's not good at all. And then, with sufficient reflection, that person realises the lines between the dots were always leading to this eventuality, and they were too stupid to see it.

For PoE and GGG, that someone could have been no one but me.

And it fucking sucks. It sucks that I now can't unhear Chris saying, 'hey, people like free things, right?' and knowing it was The First Taste, and that 'online-only, mtx driven free to play with regular updates' as a selling point was the early seed of that antithesis of good game design: Game-As-A-Service. It all sounded so great: a living world ARPG driven by ethical microtransactions that represented nothing more than the players' voluntary desire to fund what they love. And maybe because I was a cashed-up Diablo veteran at the time, I didn't realise that this was unsustainable, but I bet Chris did. He had the foresight to know that buy-to-play wasn't sustainable either -- I thought free to play was his expression of uncertainty and a lack of confidence in the product, that it wouldn't sell that many units. But no, it was the opposite: he knew that buy-to-play was on the way out, and that the real money lurks in convincing players they need to keep giving money EVEN WHEN they're not actually buying anything related to enhancing the gameplay experience.

Can you in all honesty look at PoE now and see where all that money goes? $50m USD *a year*. Do you feel like you're playing a game that's worth that much? I'm not saying that money's gone straight to GGG/Tencent's wallet. It doesn't work that way at all. I am saying, however, that I see a significant gap between how much money supporters have put into PoE for the past nine years and the quality of their experience. You would not see this gap with a buy-to-play game: not even the much-maligned buy-to-play ARPG Wolcen, which sold very well and then let pretty much everyone down, has that gap. We paid, at most, $40USD for that game. Virtually nothing in light of your little badge collection, Jerle, or my forsaken trove of relentless accumulation. And yet because it was buy-to-play, people were like 'this was such a waste of my money'. GaaS and drip-feed support systems skew the fuck out of how users perceive their spending. It's fucking insidious.

I knew I would never get my money's worth with PoE, right from that first Diamond purchase. I made the decision there and then I wouldn't be buying the game but instead buying into its creation, its process of growth and existence. That's what I wanted to be a part of, and indeed I was. And so I justify all that spending -- and so any supporter does. $1000 a year? Shit, that's cheap for a hobby/interest that gives you dozens of hours of immersive entertainment a week. $500 a year? That's basically a WoW subscription. $100 overall for some stash tabs? Fucking. Bargain.

But then you add it all up and look at the end product: a game that's worth several hundred million dollars...but plays like one made with a tenth of that budget. A fifth, if we're being very generous.

How in hell is that a 'bargain'? Other than by personal experience, how is that even vaguely justifiable?

And it's all because they started free to play without pay to win, and it continues because the revenue generation shifted from schmucks like me, you, many of my fellow Bird-Lovers and anyone else who believed in that original vision, to the mass wealth generation found in schmoozing streamers and influencers.

That's when things really took off. But let's not forget that PoE had Twitch integration by mid 2013. This was well before streamers 'took over' -- barely a year after Kripp brought the first wave during a few beta weekend. Just one more way in which Chris saw the future. This future. Maybe not quite this compromised but still, it was always heading towards significant streamer presence and influence. Always.

I think part of where it went wrong was the loss of GGG-run race seasons. That was supposed to be the main event, the big leagues as it were, in which Your Favourite Streamer would race against Other Favourite Streamers in a number of short but intense events. Turns out they didn't need that, and for some reason players were perfectly fine watching Their Favourite Streamer just play a full league for weeks on end. Well, easy to drop that waste of resources and time then...but they shouldn't have, because allowing streamers to take over the actual league was like letting Usain Bolt enter your local fun-run. You can still compete but you might as well not. Instead you're just participating, in which case you might as well just stroll.

post-shower edit: actually, there's a flaw with that analogy. Bolt is a sprinter; fun-runs are typically mini-marathons. So maybe that's what happened: GGG anticipated sprinters but got marathon enthusiasts instead, and didn't quite know how to accommodate that given they expected the league to be the 'fun run' to the race season's 'serious competition'...dunno. All I know is they should have found some way to keep the so-called pros and the average player in separate fields, thereby maintaining (or achieving, if we're being absolutely honest) PoE's status as both a 'fun game' and a 'serious e-sport'.

Anyway, that's enough out of me. For now. Suffice to say, the amount of streamer influence over PoE right now IS wrong and you should trust that feeling.

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Anyway, that's enough out of me. For now. Suffice to say, the amount of streamer influence over PoE right now IS wrong and you should trust that feeling.

People tend to copy-paste streamers/meta/tournament games in just about every game. The only time you won't need to is when you know the game well enough, which is something most players don't have time for, knowing all them gritty details and then being creative with em.

Streamers rigged the community designed MTX by brigading it when currency had the lead that Sharknado now has on it. Pretty disgusting, hope everyone who voted for the alternatives dont buy it due to the lack of integrity of others making their fanboys pick what they like over letting the actual community decide.

Yet another thing ruined by streamers, im soo disappointed.



Edit - @forever/jer ~ The reason why it feels bad is because it is bad. This isnt like a competition where you rally your friends, family, etc in order to win at something. This is a community event.

Theres a very big difference between advertising that something is taking place and telling someone what to pick, obviously the second is what happened.

In my opinion thats a complete lack of integrity for something that should bring the community together but instead they decided to split the community apart even further for their own agenda.

This is going to leave a sour taste in everyones mouth because it wasnt about who wins, its about what the community decides on. Instead, streamers decided to turn this into a personal competition because they lack enough integrity and maturity.

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PoE is free to play, so play it for free

Ok so i will keep doing what I've been doling for the past 5 years...ive had it figured out from the start bois

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Do you feel like you're playing a game that's worth that much?

Very easy answer: Yes. Glad we talked about it :)