Thoughts on GGG's dishonesty, false advertising, and new stash tabs.

Even if everything Crackmonster hopes is true about GGG is absolutely true, I have no problem with folks holding GGG accountable for GGG's own words. This is important because it is important that GGG should choose their words carefully and try hard to only speak the truth. If GGG was not held to account then it would only make it more likely that such problems might occur more often in the future.

So, even though I personally hold a more middle of the road view on this issue, I still appreciate and support folks that are more bothered by GGG's dishonesty.

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ciel289 wrote:

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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Antigegner wrote:

Dishonesty:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/heqok2/chris_wilson_at_exilecon_stating_that_ggg_doesnt/

False Advertising:
The currency tab was sold saying that ALL currency will go in it. It doesn't currently.

@Crackmonster: please elaborate on your statement. I'm willing to listen.

Your statement about false advertising is arguably true, but my accusation in the OP was much more specific, and it references their in-game spam claiming that all stash tabs are on sale even when they are not.

I get it; it's a placeholder message, and they didn't want to take the time to replace it with one which is accurate. The fact that they never put new tab types on sale is not an excuse; it is not the consumer's job to keep track of these things. It is the business's job to tell the consumer the truth.

Furthermore, they did this once before, which as I said was quite rude, and then continued to do so after it was brought to their attention. So my post explicitly asks them not to do it again, and... about a week later they do exactly that. This is dishonest, no matter how you spin it.

I assume Crackmonster didn't read the OP right before saying that, because the edits I made make it quite clear why I subsequently added the word to the thread title.

which tab wasnt one sale? the only thng that wasnt on sale was the "league bundle" and that wasnt on sale because its a temporary offer and will be removed soon
this was stated in the anouncment post of the 3 new tabs

At the time I made that addition, the new stash tabs were not on sale.

I wouldn't necessarily accuse them of being dishonest. Motivated reasoning can get you far enough to cover all the issues that have arisen up till now without requiring intentional dishonesty.

That being said, there's no need to add a "T" at the end of "GGG". These issues have appeared way before the acquisition, so it's entirely on them, let's not give them a scapegoat.

Also, I am wondering if they are getting any player opinions before getting on with their marketing choices. It seems to me that simply asking some players their opinions and taking them into account should have gone a great way to avoid some of the debatable choices they have made. Yet those choices were made.

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Angry_Casual wrote:

Also, I am wondering if they are getting any player opinions before getting on with their marketing choices. It seems to me that simply asking some players their opinions and taking them into account should have gone a great way to avoid some of the debatable choices they have made. Yet those choices were made.

I think that some of those choices had obvious enough consequences that many at GGG knew about it, or at least were expecting it.
As subjective as "obvious" is, I really cannot think that they genuinely did not know.


plus, as pointed out :

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Antigegner wrote:

even if we grant them to make a mistake....why haven't they corrected it? They had two chances: one before they implemented something and one afterwards and they failed to make good on what they promised on both occasions.

I can't be bothered to restate myself.

Let me however say this for your absolute thinkers. There are no absolute's in real life, everyone is a balance of successes and failures, and just because you have made some failures doesn't mean you are failer. It matters how much you fail vs succeed over time, and that is why the relative state is fully relevant.

I didn't follow all cases here closely but what you are upset about a stash tab not granting as much as you thought or game being updated later so its no longer sufficient etc? Look, these are just so small things.

And you are making many assumptions on why they do this and that and now youre saying they schemed on making players buy more map tabs etc? When it already could be perfectly explained by their tendency to take forever to address obvious things. Not all things are evil plannings, some things are just incompetence.

As for petty department ends where money is concerned. Lol. Gettting caught up in small change is the definition of petty almost. Unless you live in some country where it's a fortune but i doubt that is so.

Let me tell you something about GGG. They are a fucking super complicated organism, and they showed time and time again that they introduce stuff and not consider or correct or polish the consequences over and over. It's just their design and company approach. They put things in, then they see what happens and often it takes them way to long to address something and before they fix one problem they introduce three more, ignoring feedback for ages. While it can be annoying and often i don't agree with the way they do it - they don't do it to deceive, they are trying the best they can to keep developing.

All in all these are tiny material things they don't matter even a bit for me compared to what has happened to the actual gameplay and the feeling of playing the game. As long as the money involved is not insane, i can easily look past it and focus mostly on gameplay. If stash tabs are breaking your economy then, well that sucks for you but the game aint built on freeloaders you know and you only need a handful of key tabs to play the game well.

Look you should just have made a thread called "update your mtx stash tab info please it is currently misleading" or some shit instead calling all this. Nowadays, everyone throwing a fit if anything goes a little against them, sheesh. Worse can you can threaten that its legal to ask for the money back(which at least in the past they always were quite willing to help with anyway) - but lets face it you won't coz you need those tabs so yea whatcha really gonna do? Nah you just mad that tabs keep growing and more are required to play.

Have you ever considered that they might be aware that they are going to keep flooding the game with currency stuff and cant put everything into 1 stash tab? That before they make stash stash tabs which ofc is way too technically advanced for them they rather stick with single stash tabs and brace for the future? No? Oh well

The way they do things, develop, has caused me to stop playing coz the game is a mess and feedback ignored for years. But i don't think it's fair to consider them dishonest they do what they can in their own way. Sure, they have turned a bit more generic in their approach to marketing and player communcation as the company has gotten older, but such is the way of things.

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Crackmonster wrote:

While it can be annoying and often i don't agree with the way they do it - they don't do it to deceive, they are trying the best they can to keep developing.

You cannot know this for sure, and given the current competition between companies in our societies, that would be quite a rare thing, were it the case.

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Crackmonster wrote:

Look you should just have made a thread called "update your mtx stash tab info please it is currently misleading" or some shit instead calling all this. Nowadays, everyone throwing a fit if anything goes a little against them, sheesh. Worse can you can threaten that its legal to ask for the money back(which at least in the past they always were quite willing to help with anyway) - but lets face it you won't coz you need those tabs so yea whatcha really gonna do? Nah you just mad that tabs keep growing and more are required to play.

Everybody takes dishonesty to a different degree, I personally really dislike it, and I have seen too much of "say on thing - do something else instead" from GGG.
I used to believe in GGG, I really do.

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Crackmonster wrote:

Have you ever considered that they might be aware that they are going to keep flooding the game with currency stuff and cant put everything into 1 stash tab? That before they make stash stash tabs which ofc is way too technically advanced for them they rather stick with single stash tabs and brace for the future? No? Oh well

Too technically advanced ?
Absolutely no way, the map tab clearly shows that they are capable of much more than "single stash tabs" :).

I think that you are underestimating what GGG could do, it's a matter of willing to do it and the economical consequences here I'm afraid.

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Crackmonster wrote:

The way they do things, develop, has caused me to stop playing coz the game is a mess and feedback ignored for years.

See ? That's what I am talking about :
They ignore most feedback ( dismissing feedback can obviously be good, ignoring though .... ), but on the other hand they pretend they don't during podcasts, conventions or else.
I personally have a problem with that, and it's part of why I am not playing anymore.
Did they genuinely say things that they thought they would do ? I cannot say for sure, but it's been too much for me to believe it at least.


PS : "but such is the way of things" can make sense in the case of thigns that are completely out of control, but the becoming of their company is not one of it.
I guess GGG could say "we grew bigger, and we could not have kept the game going if we had been purely ethical and followed our initial design goals" and we would never know if such a statement would be true or not ....
But they chose to do all what they have done, and given that there still isn't other big competitors on the market, I personally do not believe that it all boils down to :"that can't be helped, such is the way of things" in this case.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

At the time I made that addition, the new stash tabs were not on sale.

again in the anouncment post of the new tabs they clearly said :

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These new tabs will eventually go on sale with normal stash tab discounts. They won't be featured in the stash tab sale happening this coming weekend but they will be featured in the sale that will occur three weeks after that. The bundle will not be further discounted, and will probably be removed in the future because it only makes sense to users who need exactly these three tabs.

sorry, double post

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Crackmonster wrote:

I can't be bothered to restate myself.

Let me however say this for your absolute thinkers. There are no absolute's in real life, everyone is a balance of successes and failures, and just because you have made some failures doesn't mean you are failer. It matters how much you fail vs succeed over time, and that is why the relative state is fully relevant.

read this on absolute truths: https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=tis

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Crackmonster wrote:

I didn't follow all cases here closely but what you are upset about a stash tab not granting as much as you thought or game being updated later so its no longer sufficient etc? Look, these are just so small things.

And you are making many assumptions on why they do this and that and now you're saying they schemed on making players buy more map tabs etc? When it already could be perfectly explained by their tendency to take forever to address obvious things. Not all things are evil plannings, some things are just incompetence.

As for petty department ends where money is concerned. Lol. Gettting caught up in small change is the definition of petty almost. Unless you live in some country where it's a fortune but i doubt that is so.

1.) Their tendency to take forever is not a good explanation for doing something on purpose and then not fixing it once they have been told.

2.) So, small money is petty? Well, then you would probably not mind if scammers cheat old people out of their money as long as it's a small amount. Selling crappy items to them for example that do not work 100% or break really fast or do not contain everything that was promised/advertised. I bet many companies would love customers like you.

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Crackmonster wrote:

Let me tell you something about GGG. They are a fucking super complicated organism, and they showed time and time again that they introduce stuff and not consider or correct or polish the consequences over and over. It's just their design and company approach. They put things in, then they see what happens and often it takes them way to long to address something and before they fix one problem they introduce three more, ignoring feedback for ages. While it can be annoying and often i don't agree with the way they do it - they don't do it to deceive, they are trying the best they can to keep developing.

1.) you just told me that I make a lot of assumptions about GGGT and then u start this paragraph with 'let me tell you something about GGG...'. That's funny.

2.) You say they ignore feedback for ages. Exactly. They also ignore feedback that tells them that they are liars and use false advertisement. In the following paragraphs you will suggest to me that I should have just written a thread called "update your mtx stash tab info please it is currently misleading"....yet here you just tell me that they ignore feedback for ages. That's funny. You seem to also assume that we used liar and false advertisement right from the start, as if this here is the first thread ever about this. Nope. This is the kind of thread you get after ignoring valid feedback for a long time.

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Crackmonster wrote:

All in all these are tiny material things they don't matter even a bit for me compared to what has happened to the actual gameplay and the feeling of playing the game. As long as the money involved is not insane, i can easily look past it and focus mostly on gameplay. If stash tabs are breaking your economy then, well that sucks for you but the game aint built on freeloaders you know and you only need a handful of key tabs to play the game well.

They don't matter to you because it's a tiny amount of money FOR YOU but they (GGGT) live from this and they know that if it doesn't hurt much they can get away with it with many people.
The gameplay is of course also terrible, I agree, but I didn't pay for that. It's free. As you can see we didn't complain about the supporter packs we bought and with which we supported the free game. We are upset about something else.

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Crackmonster wrote:

Look you should just have made a thread called "update your mtx stash tab info please it is currently misleading" or some shit instead calling all this. Nowadays, everyone throwing a fit if anything goes a little against them, sheesh. Worse can you can threaten that its legal to ask for the money back(which at least in the past they always were quite willing to help with anyway) - but lets face it you won't coz you need those tabs so yea whatcha really gonna do? Nah you just mad that tabs keep growing and more are required to play.

1.) I answered that already above.

2.) You write "Nowadays everyone throwing a fit..." I thought you don't like assumptions and generalizations and exaggeration?

3.) that last part...I think your emotions got the better of you. If you would have read the thread you would have seen that I am willing to pay for tabs. Just read what I wrote about a skill-gem-tab....

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Crackmonster wrote:

Have you ever considered that they might be aware that they are going to keep flooding the game with currency stuff and cant put everything into 1 stash tab? That before they make stash stash tabs which ofc is way too technically advanced for them they rather stick with single stash tabs and brace for the future? No? Oh well.

1.) Assumptions. I thought you don't like Assumptions...I can not discuss something that might happen in the future but I can discuss something that has already happened - several times.

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Crackmonster wrote:

The way they do things, develop, has caused me to stop playing coz the game is a mess and feedback ignored for years. But i don't think it's fair to consider them dishonest they do what they can in their own way. Sure, they have turned a bit more generic in their approach to marketing and player communcation as the company has gotten older, but such is the way of things.

1.) "they do what they can in their own way." That's a great euphemism ;-)

2.) at least we agree that the game in its current form is bad...at least one thing. :D

I agree with the comments on cash grab rather than incorporating into existing tabs where appropriate, it is crossing a line and I won't be buying them

Of course they want to make money, that's why we all work, the balance is charging money for goods/services that people value and when you have shareholders to please and a workforce to support its very easy to convince yourself you are providing value for money.

The feedback is important to help companies who care to avoid this as much as possible, but accusations of malicious intent and second guessing internal company/technical workings isn't helpful and is practically guaranteed to be wrong. Miscommunication and ignorance are not the same as dishonesty, and everyone feels that their personal bugbear is simple to fix and while this may be true, there are also a thousand other easy fixes that need doing competing for attention.

But yeah, specialized tabs should be about consolidation and convenience, not causing extra stash clutter.