State of POE forums 2024

In fairness the PoE community, since before Bex even left, has been absolutely awful.

Whether it's Reddit, Discords, or here, it's completely devolved over the last number of years. It's a shocking decline from the previous 5 or so years when the game released.

Like even now, the locking of the thread in GD on the gender discussion, is just a bad decsison imo, even if the thread was in bad faith to begin with. Likely there would have been a few posts but it would have died off. Now by locking it, it's looks like it is a subject they are sensitive about (even if the OP created it to troll or bait)

On that topic, at some point GGG is going to have to answer the developmental decision to gender lock the new characters in PoE2 for seemingly no reason.

There are going to be legit issues on that I suspect as PoE2 gets closer to release.

i see that in this forum there are a lot of highly passionate people.

i've been ignoring a lot of drama and been reducing my involvement in the forums recently. but one thing i do realize in the past 1-2 weeks threads have been locked more frequently.

i kinda took what asmongold said to heart. its no use arguing with people online.

sometimes their minds are already made up, and sometimes theyre either willingly choosing not to see the opposite side, or sometimes they're just downright stupid.

sometimes i too need to remind myself. when i m on this forum, i m not here trying to convince some rando on my pov. i m here to convince GGG to make a change that i believe benefits most people.

if ggg sees value in my words they would. else they wont. debating with someone with an opposing view is fine but recognizing that they're just being stubborn with their mindset, its better to just stop talking rather than slinging mud. which i too might have been involved in.

sometimes i just close an active discussion. its really not worth my time. i've said my piece and made my peace.

as for the gender thing, i just wish that ggg allowed us to use any base character model rather than locking us to one character model per class.

POE is about freedom of expression/builds. if GGG wanted to highlight class identity, they need to make exclusive class locked gear and exclusive class locked mtx. which actually has already crept into the game via the maroider mtx.

i would go as far as say that if GGG wants to push for class identity, then their entire mtx model would fail. the way i see it, exiles are an expression of the player. we are nameless exiles. one of many. we are nobodies who became important because of our strength. we the player are the exiles. the exile themselves are not iconic. even the witch with her bone armor is not iconic enough. catarina on the other hand IS iconic. she's distinct.

even when a player gets fond of their character, due to the classless nature of POE, their character would be wearing armour that is also equipable by any character in the game. if he/she chose to cosplay with that armor set, if the armorset is fully covered, we cannot discern the class they are trying to cosplay as.

i really see no real reason to lock the character models to classes anymore.

"

exsea wrote:

State of POE forums 2024:

LMFAO

poe isnt classless and isnt intended to be classless, chris has said that having a classless game is a mistake and they have made efforts over time to make class choices more important because they dont think the initial game systems made them important enough.

theyre making them even more important in poe2 and that is part of why they are leaving out the scion.



having gender locked characters for 'no reason' is a statement weighted with the idea that the default should be to not gender lock things. its a piece of art, the mona lisa doesnt come in male and female options, i cant chose if ripley is a man or a woman when im watching alien, lara croft is a woman, zakalwe in the culture novels is a man. i dont think any of these bits of media would have given options if they could, i think they made a character and that character had a personality, an identity and included in that was a gender which was intentional.

its really up to them where they think they wish to add flexibility in a character and where they want the decision to pick that character over another to have significance, and where they think they get value from development resources and mtx. i dont think they have to answer to anything or need to do anything they are not doing, if people want them to do something else then thats a perfectly valid opinion and feedback but it would be wrong to suggest there is some kind of divine law or logic they must follow on these subjects.

Just to clarify, I'm not saying GGG has to do one thing or the other for this, or any design decisions for that matter.

But on this particular topic, with a new game coming out that they have complete developmental freedom on, with competition already offering a gender selector, and GGG having commented on it in the past as "wanting to do this", it seems to me that there isn't a good reason to intentionally divest from a player option standpoint. Again, why?

Also, this isn't a single player narrative driven game, nor are they locked into a narrative direction with PoE2. The notion there wouldnt be a male Warlock, or male Ranger, or female Fighters in Wraeclast is actually less believable than the direction they have gone. Its not like they expand deeply on their character choices with backgrounds, names, stories, histories, etc...

Had they done that, I would be far more understanding. But they havent, not even close. It's as generic as you can imagine.

It's clear to me, they could have done something, but they chose not to. I'm not saying they have to, but I do think they owe an explanation as to why. That doesn't mean an explanation is coming, and GGG isnt exactly forthcoming with communication the past number of years. They do the bare minimum for marketing, but that's about it. There isn't a "campfire" type discussion they have, nor do they seek feedback directly anymore it seems.

Either way, the gender selector is a bit of a moot point since PoE2 is shipping without it. I just maintain this is a poor decsison, with little upside, and will likely be difficult to be defended with any developmental integrity. (Other than just saying they didn't think it was important to them, which is bold imo)

If GGG does get some grief for it, once the media blitz on PoE2 happens, I think it's completely fair. And if they paywall it later with MTX...well, that would certainly be a decsison.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

poe isnt classless and isnt intended to be classless, chris has said that having a classless game is a mistake and they have made efforts over time to make class choices more important because they dont think the initial game systems made them important enough.

as someone who fell in love with poe because it was marketed as being classless, its sad to hear. and yeah we all can see how things are shaping up to be more class oriented such as the forbidden flesh thingies which are class locked. i kinda view them in great disdain.

but it doesnt matter in the grand scheme of things. poe2 has skills that are ascendency locked. even their weapon skills are gonna be very narrowed down to the weapon classes that are compatible with the skill.

for example my fav flicker strike is now staff/unarmed only?

i m guessing my fav viper strike would be dagger/claw only too.

but in any case. due to the inherent classless nature of poe, POE will never have class identity where visuals are concerned. even a gruff marauder can use shavronnes if he so chooses. theres no stopping it. we even have mtx to apply the look of an item to a different item.

oh well. all i have is hopium and even with that i doubt ggg would cave.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

In fairness the PoE community, since before Bex even left, has been absolutely awful.

Whether it's Reddit, Discords, or here, it's completely devolved over the last number of years. It's a shocking decline from the previous 5 or so years when the game released.

Like even now, the locking of the thread in GD on the gender discussion, is just a bad decsison imo, even if the thread was in bad faith to begin with. Likely there would have been a few posts but it would have died off. Now by locking it, it's looks like it is a subject they are sensitive about (even if the OP created it to troll or bait)

On that topic, at some point GGG is going to have to answer the developmental decision to gender lock the new characters in PoE2 for seemingly no reason.

There are going to be legit issues on that I suspect as PoE2 gets closer to release.

Err the forums were always in an awful state.

Closed Beta 2012: Charan was a mod and a double or triple Diamond supporter. Some people accused him to have paid himself to mod status. Maybe he can clarify it himself but to me it looked like he took the invitation of those people antagonizing him and made them look stupid(most of them didn't even need to do anything and citing some phrases did the job). Those players were happy during OB when the there were paid mods in NZ. I no exaggeration that between closed Beta and some point at Open Beta he was the most hated user in PoE. When he joined reddit he was downvoted into oblivion just because "It's Charan" and that's saying something because reddit wanted one user to become a reddit mod one week the next week they wanted his head impaled on a stick.


I forgot how the rule change was called so I call it "no adhominems", which was the rise of concern trolls, whiteknight trolls and contradictionary engagement trolls. I hated the latter two because they avoided punishment for a long time.

Simplified example: U1:"Desynch causes deaths" U2:"No desynch is fine git gud"
U1 starts flaming at some point U2 hits the report button and U2 gets punished.
Those trolls even caused retroactive bans before the "no adhominem" rule.

At that point PoE was slightly better than the League of Legends subreddit in a reddit sentiment analysis. But White Knights defended it's not toxic players but the lore and item names.

There were the common no religion/no politics rulechanges. I forgot the topics causing it but it's very common.

The game received more servers at some point and you could clearly see it wasn't lore or itemnames it's a toxic community. At that point you could even say straight up racist because some players didn't like the servers they were assigned to or the players they had to play with.

The next phase was the MVP introduction which was a imo a total failure and Bambi had the right to mock it. Simply said totally clueless people parroting stuff in Tech Support got MVP, the most helpful user in Gameplayhelp never got one(likely for having a potty mouth), random convienent users got MVP. IIRC Charan was considered MVP but he declined. The MVP system is a horrible addition in any game. MVPs will get mocked when they get game mechanics wrong(IIRC one MVP constantly screwed up additive and multiplicative) or users in the Tech Forum have no faith in getting helped when some MVP posts: Update Drivers.... ending with Reintall windows.

I saw many posts about huge ggpk files and they were told to reinstall instead of using the ggpk defragmenter. People got the canned techsupport response, suggested to upgrade(not essentially MVP) when it was more likely a hardware issue with the powersupply, overheating CPU or damaged GPU.

There are way more examples.

I don't know anything about discords but I saw a lot of drama on something called TFT and the discords of some streamers.


Any topics about Gender should be closed because it's a politicized topic simple as that. During Covid the Covidthread was closed because it became politicized.
The issue is bad faith, trolling and Maincharacter syndrome.


In PoE get to replay the story+lore of one of 7 exiles. In PoE2 you get to replay the story+lore of X characters. End of discussion. GGG hired writers and they deceide on the story you can later give feedback whether or not you liked it. We are at a point where authors get attacked on socialmedia because they didn't make things 100% clear, some fanficwriters want their fanfiction to be Canon or actors get attacked because they played/declined a role.

In GGGs place I would simply explain it that such a small issue causes A LOT of development time. Twice the amount models for gear, twice the characteranimations etc. People might not remember but PoE added class after class and there was some time between Shadow and Scion despite the Skilltrree always hinting there would be a 7th class.

"

i kinda took what asmongold said to heart. its no use arguing with people online.

sometimes their minds are already made up, and sometimes theyre either willingly choosing not to see the opposite side, or sometimes they're just downright stupid.

sometimes i too need to remind myself. when i m on this forum, i m not here trying to convince some rando on my pov. i m here to convince GGG to make a change that i believe benefits most people.

This is incorrect. You need to differenciate between trolls, agitatators and normal people. Trolls and Agitators have different goals.
Trolls can be ignored but agitators need to be exposed and driven away.
Maybe recruiter would be another good term because they usually have financial interests.

Imo all social media needs to be nuked because I know of several people including in my family that turned into conspiracist nutjobs after social media.

Agitators pulled them into social media circles and now they believe BS like Chemtrails. Normally you would just cut them out of your life but it's different with family. It might be funny at first when you read somebody post "My Grandma got banned of Facebook" and then you find out that his Grandma got programmed into a full blown conspiracy racist. And believe me it takes a lot of more time to deprogram somebody than to drive away an agitator/recruiter in an internet discussion.

The streamer you mentioned is target of many trolls and agitators. He literally talked about a game less than 80 people played on steamcharts. That's the needle in haystick.

"

if ggg sees value in my words they would. else they wont. debating with someone with an opposing view is fine but recognizing that they're just being stubborn with their mindset, its better to just stop talking rather than slinging mud. which i too might have been involved in.

GGG removed themselves from discussion years ago. They got plenty of feedback didn't act on it. They couldn't deliver on many things and a lot of stuff is PR talk. I remind you people got muted/probated for "Path of Nerfs" "No fun allowed". They silently removed the "Guild events coming soon"
I never saw a statement that stated that those things are abandoned cause Y.

You got an unofficial half true responses why racing was dropped.

There were also stealth nerfs.
I remember when Open Beta hit how poor the map droprate was compared to CB.
Then years later you witness the Kalandra fiasco.

When they ramped up the damage they got plenty of feedback of overtuned damage with untested mechanics. Therefore PoE had Pseudo Melee and Ranged.
Highlight was once again the Kalandra fiasco.

What happened to the Forsaken Masters btw? I remember there was feedback that people hated to do their missions over and over every league. Did they at least got rid of that grind?

"

theyre making them even more important in poe2 and that is part of why they are leaving out the scion.

The Scion had a different issue. Upon releases Spectral Weapon was new and a great skill but the Scion was a Jack of all trades.

Usually the classes migrated best into their neighbouring areas:
Templar to Witch and Mara
Witch to Templar and Shadow
Mara to Duelist and Templar
Duelist to Mara and Ranger
Ranger to Shadow and Dueliest
Shadow to Witch and Ranger

Nobody build a Witch and went like:"Yeah now I gonna go stat to the STR tree"

The Scion had inferior nodes for several builds and in the end it was "Why didn't you take Class X?"

During short Races it was very obvious because you'd play Scion like an inferior Duelist.

I cannot speak for post jewel/ascendancies though.

It's kinda like early MtG when certain colors have good synergies and there were very few cards of all colors like Sliverqueen you'd cast while playing 3 colors tops. You'd never play something like Blue+Red.

lol omg you're from the old times.

its been a huge long time since i heard of desync deaths.i have several characters with some variation of desync in their name.

as for what you mention about asmongold, if we're being specific, you're correct. its inaccurate to say "everyone" is like that. definitely there are a lot of agitators etc. but i still say it has some truth to it in a very general statement.

i've debated many people online. one important skill is you need to identify their intent. some people just cant be reasoned with. you can give them 1001 explanation, with elaboration, examples etc. but nope. its not enough for them. its like arguing with a flat earther.

thus if i identify someone exhibiting certain traits, i just make a mental note not to give that person too much of my time.

and yeah you're right on how GGG has been very silent nowadays.

as for charan, his lore is not really known to most people nowadays. personally all i know is that he used to be very active in the forums then he got pissed off so much he got GGG to delete all his posts, then disappear.

him being hated is something i didnt know.

in any case he's lurking on the forums and is active recently but using a different account.

scion was a very interesting addition to POE to be honest. but when ascendencies came GGG ran out of ideas for the scion which kinda made her suck ass badly. its really tragic.

if ascendencies didnt exist i would argue that ascendant would actually be OP as she has easy and fast access to jewels slots.

as for the forums being toxic. i would say all forums have toxicity. just that in the recent week or 2 i've seen so many thread here being locked up, which is something i havent seen happen and is quite exceptional.