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

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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.

There's been a new development in the image I posted a little while ago. Someone dug up an image of ultimatum launch queue, the very reason this thread exists.

I myself didn't really see the queue reach the levels seen in ultimatum, but to reiterate, I didn't spend long in queue and only joined later. So, I'm wondering if GGG can explain the difference in #'s seen?

Expedition was so bad half of people left and never came back.
Mystery solved.

As true today as it was the day I first said it.

Last time I spent money I bought a couple stash tabs in ritual but I hate the state of the game now so I'm not giving them a penny. Hope I'm helping by voting with my wallet too.

As for priority queue it's kinda scummy but I don't mind since every league has a shit launch, I'm used to it so I just wait a couple of days. But the game is just shit in general now.