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

Yikes, it sure is disheartening to read about GGG's discriminatory practices.
Unfortunately, Chris' response seems like more of a "sorry we got caught" sort of thing by trying to make excuses.

Hopefully they'll try to be a more ethical company in this upcoming league!

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Second place would be the one that pondered what devourers really look like.

Thank you so much for reminding me of that one. I had to laugh out loud just at the mention of it!

Just perusing the thread.

One the note about the Father's Day gift - Finding gifts for my Dad is always tough, partly because he really doesn't like anyone spending money on him and partly because there isn't anything he really needs. When I do find a gift that he really likes, it is more rewarding than finding a mirror in Path of Exile.

A few years ago, it was finding a book from an old series that he was missing.

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Turtledove wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Second place would be the one that pondered what devourers really look like.

Thank you so much for reminding me of that one. I had to laugh out loud just at the mention of it!

Same! That was an incredible thread.

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DalaiLama wrote:

Just perusing the thread.

One the note about the Father's Day gift - Finding gifts for my Dad is always tough, partly because he really doesn't like anyone spending money on him and partly because there isn't anything he really needs. When I do find a gift that he really likes, it is more rewarding than finding a mirror in Path of Exile.

A few years ago, it was finding a book from an old series that he was missing.

Dads bday is coming up and coincides with certain easing of restrictions down here so I'm very much looking forward to seeing him in person. We had a really rocky relationship when i was a kid but he has since reconciled himself to my basic harmless uselessness so...yknow, that is gift enough for the both of us I think.

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Is this my 'sky is falling' thread? Pretty sure I have made more dramatic ones over the years. There is an end coming and I don't think it will have anything to do with GGG's symbiotic streamer behaviour. I think, rather ironically, PoE will be collateral damage. A little smear on the windshield keeping a lot of larger ones company.

I hope it's a long way off. So far off that maybe things will change by then.

Maybe it's all just posturing. Maybe.

The sky isn't falling. It's just going to rain, I think, and wash the itsy bitsy spiders out. And their skeletons. And their blood. And their inappropriate content.

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I really liked the Goddess Scorned riddle thread. That was a high point for me in my PoE experience. Probably one of the highest. Seeing everyone come together to experiment and puzzle and discuss. Being able to facilitate that felt...fucking awesome.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Is this my 'sky is falling' thread? Pretty sure I have made more dramatic ones over the years. There is an end coming and I don't think it will have anything to do with GGG's symbiotic streamer behaviour

The thing I find most interesting is how this player divide has manifested in recent times.

I actually think Streamers have become a target of "average" player anger about development direction because it's right in their face. Almost taunting. It's not their fault directly.

It seems to me that GGG wants a more niche, elite focused, more hardcore game, (which is fine btw), but they want the revenue and player concurrency from a larger scope of potential players as well.

What happens is that priorities get all mixed up, and balance / content management become a nightmare. The result is two fold. One you get community toxicity on social media and platforms like Reddit, Twitter, here, etc... where different groups are pitted against each other. And secondly developmental decisions and planning appear to clash with revenue potential, and larger player appeal.

I do have some thoughts about the mistakes and missteps GGG has made, but I think that ventures too far into personal matters when thinking about Chris's vision or Devs professional performance. How that impacts the game, both directly, and also indirectly from a standpoint of what the optics are.

I think GGG has a significant amount of work to do to recapture the casual/average player, if that is something they even want to do. If not, the next 6-9 months will be very interesting.

Oh to be a fly on the wall during those quarterly business review calls with Tencent...when developmental freedom clashes with financial expectations.

You have written some good things on here over the years but that was really insightful. I agree with all of it -- I have never leveled my ire at streamers themselves, not even here where some happily accepted TenyuanGGG's divine favour when so many other devotees, those who perhaps bring fewer lambs to the altar, were left waiting for their turn in the temple. As I said, they were just doing what they are supposed to do.

Streamers work damn hard. We've seen some of the best suffer full on breakdowns. We know, deep down, that the cost of their success is the same cost of any sort of fame gained through doing what you love full time: you can no longer do what you love for the same reason as why you loved it to begin with. You couldn't pay me enough to turn my gaming into a performance. I'd rather flip burgers or shovel literal shit -- at least with those I could take my shitty little paycheque, buy some games on steam on the cheap and play them any gods damn way I want, for as long or as short as I want.

Now here is where my resentment of TenyuanGGG really kicks in. Okay, so you want a higher profile for PoE, and you do it by making your game as streamed as possible. Fine, as you said. But what they've done is made that such a glaringly obvious priority that they've simply forced everyone else to keep up with the changes necessary to make PoE exciting to watch (utterly alien concept to me but clearly it is, given the numbers). In other words, they took what started as an amateur pastime, a fun but challenging hobby, dare we call it...a game? And made it a job not in the organic sense that grrat games can become brilliantly job-like but in such a ham fisted way that you would have to be somehow blind to not see it.

No guns are placed against heads. No one is "forced" to play this current PoE...but if they want to play what is easily the greatest arpg ever, they sort of have to. It's that or play any other arpg that both demands less and gives less.

As for these streamer only events with huge cash rewards, all I can think is...what, this so soon after the twitch leak revealed how few of these big streamers really need the cash? To think this is where a game funded by the goodwill of so many people buying little more than part of a tiny kiwi studio's big dream ended up: making the rich richer, and still charging what would be ludicrous prices for mtxes so wildly different to their concept art you likely wouldn't even see them in most other games.

Need I iterate, Exiles? Support PoE if you will, but I implore you, consider the message it sends in light of everything we've discussed here.

3.16 - Stream preferential treatment continues...

Coming back to post to this place because there was an image floating around of some discrepancies. This was about 1 hour preceding the league drop, I was wondering if other people can determine the veracity? I myself tried it and the image is true in that the steam player #'s kept going up while leaving and re-entering queue only moved me up about 300 paces. The queue also didn't seem to move at all while I had waited.

Was the queue actually moving for anybody in queue before league drop? It didn't for me, but I was only there for roughly 2 mins to see if it was true.

I'm not putting anything on GGG here, they are owned by tencent though. Did anyone else notice anything?

Great launch! All my issues were fixed and was able to play smoothly 15 mins into the launch.