To the senior developer who was crying...

"

Pizzarugi wrote:

I agree with some of the redditors who responded to Chris's post:
1. The meme was most likely taking a jab at the subreddit itself
2. The meme is an accurate portrayal of long-standing issues this game has had for an incredibly long time with nothing being done about it
3. I feel like there's more going on behind the scenes that caused the senior developer to get so stressed out that a meme caused them to break down

Don't get me wrong, it's pretty fucked up that a dev gets reduced to this state of mind and nobody deserves that kind of treatment. However, I don't think these kinds of memes would be so prevalent if the reasoning for it was addressed.

I dont think anyone is arguing the fact that the game has been in decline. I personally blame the corporate backing, and think it is pressure from them to turn profit that is the cause of this stress and issues. You are forced to shove new content in to push sales, which give you less time to spend on fixing issues etc etc... snowball effect that we been seeing happening for a while now.

GGG is banking on that the game will survive until PoE2 drops, and that those who have too much issues with the standing issues, will simply switch over to that. Which is something that will add even more stress on a developer that takes pride in their work, and would love to actually fix things.

Either way, as you said, feedback is important, but as this thread also shown, you get some seriously messed up people that have absolutely no regard for anyone. They will continue to bully the devs regardless.

I wrote the OP to the developers and, after reading the responses here and on Reddit, I'd like to send a message to the community as well:

Yes, the meme was making fun of Redditors complaining. So what? Your lack of empathy is causing you to bring logic & technicality into an emotionally charged situation; you're missing the forest by fixating on a single tree. The dev wasn't crying about THAT meme in particular, but ALL the memes and negativity they've seen. It adds up. Chris did the right thing in speaking up about it and the proper response from any human community, even on the internet, is to feel shame about it. We're all stressed from this awful virus disrupting our lives, so "be nicer" is the presiding message here and it’s a healthy message to send.

Also, the game factually isn’t in decline. It’s doing just fine, as evidenced by Tencent’s investment (whether you agree with that decision or not). GGG now has more resources and staff than ever before. You’re confusing your subjective ideals of how the game should be in your opinion with your perception of it’s broader perceived quality. That’s not how the world works. The devs and their decision making are what made this game popular, not you. They are better at this than you. You will continue to feel frustrated until you realize this - that you are being overconfident in the value of your own opinions.

I think all this toxicity is coming from two things primarily: Emotional incompetence and cognitive dissonance.

Internet culture values intelligence over emotional intelligence, so naturally people get logically smarter but emotionally stagnate or even become fully sociopathic (emotional retardation/deficit). Part of maturity is realizing that emotional intelligence is the far more important skill in any community of humans. Simply, you will get more done and make more friends.

Another thing is players seem to have an ideal in their minds of how things SHOULD be, but forget that their “should” might destroy what made the game successful in the first place - something the developers know all too well and have a healthy fear of every time they make a change. Sometimes they’ll get it right and sometimes they’ll get it wrong - that’s the risk they face in every content release. They know this already and don’t need you to remind them every two seconds.

This is a problem of humility in the community here. For example, younger people have idealistic expectations and become frustrated when the world doesn’t bend to those expectations - that’s a cognitive dissonance. The solution to cognitive dissonance (that sense of frustration) is practicing humility - the realization that one is frail, fallible, and needs the help of the community. Humility generally makes you happier because you lower your “bar” back down to reality and other humans become more comfortable talking to you. I recommend it.

It’s true that some of the feedback and ideas you’ve all posted are really quite good, but if you don’t practice emotional intelligence and humility in your delivery, then your ideas will never be received and ultimately acted upon. All you’ll do is ruin a dev’s day, who is a human person with feelings just like you, and nothing will be achieved.

Learn humility, learn emotional intelligence. You will be happier, so will the devs, and more will get done.

I hope this helps. :)

"

SeCKSEgai wrote:

"

Ydoum wrote:

Reddit is mostly a toxic place, and poe's subreddit is no different. The fact that the official forums are no longer the main communication device between GGG and players is just plain wrong. The fact that devs are using poe's subreddit to browse through all the crap that's posted there is even worse - it should be ignored all together. I do, however, feel sorry for the lad, and hope the little, obnoxious reddit keyboard warrior gets what he deserves.

I miss the old days where Chris would just hop onto the official forums, write some replies to threads, explain some of the mechanics, etc.

I'm actually surprised they focus on reddit over the forums - reddit is fueled by rage more than anything over even the mundane topics.

Reddit have some few advantages:

- A vote system (so they can see what will please the biggest part of the community)
- That's not their infrastructure (lower maintenance also a back-up when DDos/server downtime happen)
-Because poe subbreddit is not moderated directly by ggg its appear to be more neutral

And on a side note very toxic post will get buried way faster than in the forum ... seriously did you miss all teh recent forum post with insult/ aggresive rant recently?

But indeed reddit attract more people than the actual forum (even people that dont seeM to play anymore or to have an account) and by increasing the number of user you also increase the potential of harmful word post ... and it dont help that its so such easy to use that mostly nobody stop to think about what they writte.

edit: i hope its somewhat clear since english is not my native language

I appreciate your hard work on this game <3

I think it is not particularly tasteful, nor courteous to an employee, to announce to the world that s/he was crying over the current state of popular feedback.

"

Pizzarugi wrote:

I agree with some of the redditors who responded to Chris's post:
1. The meme was most likely taking a jab at the subreddit itself
2. The meme is an accurate portrayal of long-standing issues this game has had for an incredibly long time with nothing being done about it
3. I feel like there's more going on behind the scenes that caused the senior developer to get so stressed out that a meme caused them to break down

Don't get me wrong, it's pretty fucked up that a dev gets reduced to this state of mind and nobody deserves that kind of treatment. However, I don't think these kinds of memes would be so prevalent if the reasoning for it was addressed.

This seems like a reasonable summary of the (likely) situation. I thought the predictions, while mean-looking to anyone who hasn't been around this game for a while, were taking very clear jabs at well-established patterns that--let's face it--many of us are tired of.

One thing a lot of posters delivering feedback both here and in reddit fail to recognize (or at least fail to acknowledge) is that the delivery of a quality product requires both good workers and good management. No matter how competent you are, being asked to do something which requires X time to do well, yet being given X/3 time to do it in, is necessarily going to involve SIGNIFICANT compromises, along with all the stress that accompanies that. Isn't this what so many of us keep telling GGG?

And the only real reason for them to ignore that feedback and continue with the breakneck schedule is that GGG is a business, and in most business cultures (and evidently GGG's) $$$ will trump pride in your product almost every time.

The effects of this upon employee morale are extremely predictable. If I were an employee in this situation having a long conversation with my manager about the current state of customer feedback surrounding my hard work, I would most certainly be very upset too.

I don't think it's constructive to discuss Chris Wilson's post at the moment.
It lacks all the details relevant to know what caused the employee's distress, which is why we have varying interpretations of who to blame for it.
Unless the employee is willing to discuss the matter, either personally or through Chris Wilson, the best to do is to let it slide.

Don't get me wrong, the community (myself included) can be very toxic and vocal on many matters. That is because PoE is for a lot of us a hobby that we invest ourselves in heavily, sometimes unhealthily so, so when we feel there is an issue with it, it's hard to remain calm and constructive.
But without the proper context, it's not constructive to start putting the blame randomly (because then we usually simply target those that we already are annoyed with).

"

neo1987 wrote:

...

I think your analysis of the toxic part of the community is wrong. It all starts with assuming that those toxic people are mentally disabled rather than having normal human flaws. Not only that but you also keep out the "internet fun and memes" component.

There are people who are toxic on the internet because they find it funny but are not toxic at all in real life and stop being toxic when they see that they cause harm, as we can see now everywhere, then there are people who are toxic due to actual mental diseases and cant change, what about empathy for them? Should they be isolated and rot in hell? And then there are people who become toxic due to emotional attachment.

Not to mention that there is no clear line for everyone when ridiculing stuff and people is just harmless fun or plain malicious. Fun shit gets milliion views and thousands of dollars nowadays on the internet, it is a dead serious business ironically. Some people just like it rough and enjoy some beating here and then, others are too sensitve. Some people like attention more than dignity. Some people change their preferences all the time.

Its all a mess of individual preferences you cant draw a clear line through that and why should the sensitive dudes be the lowest common denominator for everything? They should not that would be boring.

But back to the point, I think emotional attachment is the core problem here.

Emotional attachment is a perfectly normal human thing, it does not come from mental disorders nor deficits but still is the key for healthy human beans to do all kind of irrational, harmful and cringy shit like killing each other over sports club preference after a football game in the 3rd half time of a football game.

Logic and technicality are actually concepts to battle the potential damage of deep emotional attachment and its cringe. I have no idea why you would attack those HOLY concepts to defend a game company, lol.

Even very strong emotional attachment is not considered a mental disease. It might have some extreme forms that are considered as mental diseases like psychological addiction or obsession but who the fuck knows where the line is between all this shit.

I think its better to assume that the toxic dudes are not toxic because the general lack of empathy or mental diseases but because their unhealthy emotional attachment to things makes them feel real physical pain and tortures them to a point where they cant hold back anymore. Its an everyday thing and therefor is more probable than mental diseases, which by the way should only be diagnosed by a professional.

The empathy that you demand in your post made me actually feel with the people who could not hold back because I feel like I know their pain and how hard it is to hold back SOMETIMES when reading a manifesto or announcements or watching chris talk in an interview. So if you ride the empathy train, go do the full work and check out the other side instead of saying they are mentally disabled or whatever. Its not a one way road and someone whining doesnt make it a one way road.

I dont like it when people are breaking down and are miserable and I am in no way hostile towards GGG or the senior dev that I dont know, I wish everyone the best.

We are all human beans, sometimes people cant hold back, shit happens, that is normal. It just shouldnt happen too often and should not be too brutal when it happens.

But what I really dont like about your post is

"

Also, the game factually isn’t in decline. It’s doing just fine, as evidenced by Tencent’s investment (whether you agree with that decision or not). GGG now has more resources and staff than ever before. You’re confusing your subjective ideals of how the game should be in your opinion with your perception of it’s broader perceived quality. That’s not how the world works. The devs and their decision making are what made this game popular, not you. They are better at this than you. You will continue to feel frustrated until you realize this - that you are being overconfident in the value of your own opinions.

Are you a gamer or are you a stakeholder? Why would you argue with "the company has good numbers, is growing and has strong partnerships" against people who are tired of stuff in the game, the league starts, or the game itself?

The core rational selfinterest of a gamer should be to be entertained and if he is not then the game companys profit is not a compensation for that.

The true rational argument against people who say the game is in decline would be to convince the people that the game has become better, has more content, more QoL, more stuff that people like etc.

But instead you choose to mention business numbers and whatever. WHY? Maybe having an emotional attachment to the company?

Last section in this wall of text is to talk about where the emotional attachment problem might come from, where does this EMOTIONALLY CHARGED SITUATION that you speak about in your post come from. It does not come from nowhere thats for sure.

One hand you got GGG the friendly indie company with a face, with Bex and all those nice people, on the other hand you got a game that demands effort and your time. A lot of it if you want to get anywhere. It makes sense that some people are emotionally attached to the company and its persons.

Spending effort and time and things AUTOMATICALLY brings enotional attachment to those things. The more time and commitment, the more emotional attachment. And here we are at a game that has all this data and mechanics and insanely long grinds that eat more time of people than studying a scientific field seriously in order to be mastered and HMM where does the emotional attachment come from, why do people take it so seriously, why do people see nerfs of their faourite skillgems and unique items as a PERSONAL insult? Not to mention that a lot of people spent money in good will in this game and that makes it even more personal for them. It all makes sense for them to be like that, they have all reasons to. So it also makes sense that people become hostile and take shit dead serious.

If you want to do good or prevent harm here, dont bash the other side, make people understand, dont tell them they are mentally disabled and wrong in every point, but rather negotiate with them and find at least some common grounds with discussion and negotiation.

"

Pizzarugi wrote:

I agree with some of the redditors who responded to Chris's post:
1. The meme was most likely taking a jab at the subreddit itself
2. The meme is an accurate portrayal of long-standing issues this game has had for an incredibly long time with nothing being done about it
3. I feel like there's more going on behind the scenes that caused the senior developer to get so stressed out that a meme caused them to break down

Don't get me wrong, it's pretty fucked up that a dev gets reduced to this state of mind and nobody deserves that kind of treatment. However, I don't think these kinds of memes would be so prevalent if the reasoning for it was addressed.

the post itself was addressing reddit's hyperbole, most of the posts (especially those that got deleted) shit on the game and it's designers and got massively upvoted.

it's between more depressing reading here than in those "botting and automatisation are godsent" posts which give newbies the impression that macros are all allowed and bots aren't banned cause if you post that it's illegal you get downvoted to invisibility.

"

The_Human_Tornado wrote:

But back to the point, I think emotional attachment is the core problem here.

Emotional attachment is a perfectly normal human thing, it does not come from mental disorders nor deficits but still is the key for healthy human beans to do all kind of irrational, harmful and cringy shit(...)

"

The_Human_Tornado wrote:

We are all human beans, sometimes people cant hold back, shit happens, that is normal. It just shouldnt happen too often and should not be too brutal when it happens.

i think this song would be better if you replaced "real human being" with "real human bean"

"

bwam wrote:

"

The_Human_Tornado wrote:

But back to the point, I think emotional attachment is the core problem here.

Emotional attachment is a perfectly normal human thing, it does not come from mental disorders nor deficits but still is the key for healthy human beans to do all kind of irrational, harmful and cringy shit(...)

"

The_Human_Tornado wrote:

We are all human beans, sometimes people cant hold back, shit happens, that is normal. It just shouldnt happen too often and should not be too brutal when it happens.

i think this song would be better if you replaced "real human being" with "real human bean"