Open letter to the GGG Console Developers, GGG PC Developers, and Fellow PoE Gamers

Ladies, Gentlemen, and Epicenes,

There is a lot of grumbling in the forums that you (GGG) do not care about those of us who play this beloved game on console. The most pronounced cause of this grumbling appears to be the lack of GGG responses in the console-specific forums, the lack of movement on performance issues and bug reports, and the growing list of build-breaking differences between the console and PC clients.

I see regular comments on threads in the console-specific forums to the effect that GGG and its developers ignore or do not care about console players and that the lack of responses to threads and posts in the console-specific forums indicates this disregard. However, a slightly more than cursory perusal of the forums shows a bit of a different story.

On the surface, my fellow console players seem to have a point. Since the beginning of the month, console players started 38 threads in the console bug report forum, none of which were responded to by GGG. In the same time frame, PC users started 980 threads (33 pages)(That is a lot to read for a staff the size of GGG), fourteen of which received responses from GGG. That means about one and a half percent (1.428...%) of the PC threads received a response from GGG. If we applied this percentage to the 38 posts, we would expect less than one response (0.57), which is how many GGG provided.

Nine of the fourteen responses the PC user threads received were thanks and assurances that they would pass it along, look into it, or fix it. The other five posts were GGG correcting user errors, user misunderstandings, and user's lack of information. For something to compare to that, I looked at console bug reports for December (the PC bug reports stop on page 50 with a date of December 24th). In December, we started 127 threads and received four responses (an approximately three percent (3.149...%) rate of return). The responses we received were a thank you with a question, a user error correction, a response that the report was a known bug, and an assurance that that day's patch should fix it.

I have more to say about the forums, but first, let's talk about the performance problems and bug reports. I have played PoE on PS4 since late 2019 (minus a few leagues where I did not have time). I have always had performance problems, and it seems to disconnect more frequently than in the past. However, this league crashes the application less than previous leagues I have played. While there are undeniable performance problems (the epoch-length loading screens, the texture loading times, and the slideshow effect of having too much on the screen at a time, to name but a few), if you spend a little time on the PC side of the forums, you will find that the PC users are making many (most?) of the same complaints and reporting many of the same bugs (in fact, many of the controller bugs on the PC side are things console users have been complaining about - sometimes for years).


I have more to say, but it is time to play some PoE before bed. I would wait and post later, but I looked up the numbers a few hours ago and don't want to redo them tomorrow.

Let's start with this: "The people treating you badly treat *everyone* badly" does not make it OK. A great example of this is the lack of response on performance problems this patch. Yes, PC players are experiencing lots of performance issues this patch as well, but them not fixing it on *any* platform isn't actually any better than them just not fixing it on console. Also, the lack of communication on the issue is appalling. There have been a few forum bug-report/thread responses that basically say "we're looking into it", but I personally would think that the worst game performance in years warrants a front-page post about it, and a stated plan for fixing it.

Moving on to the console player treatment issue:

While putting some numbers to it in regard to forum responses is interesting, it's a very shallow view.

First, it doesn't cover aspects that may influence these response rates. For example, lets assume that quite a few of the bug reports on both PC and Console (I know it is true for console) made during January are repeats of the same bugs by a variety of people. Many of them reported in December or even earlier. I'm guessing that GGG generally doesn't spend time answering bug reports they've already answered from a different user. However, since the vast majority of console bugs *never* get any feedback, that means that that reason doesn't apply to us. Which skews your numbers.

Then there's the fact that it's currently a holiday season. The end of December and beginning of January are peak vacation times for most companies, and GGG has commented on this issue in the past. It's a very poor time period to be doing a numerical assessment of company activity.

Moving on from the forum posts, you mention some of the other things people complain about, but don't address them at all.

For example, after the first 2 weeks or so of any given league, console basically stops getting patches; usually getting about 1 per month, rolling up 2-10 PC patches into that one patch.

Additionally, console (or at least controller-input) specific problems often get ignored, or take forever to get fixed.

A great example of this is the problem with the Flask and Gem tabs. These are PAID tabs. And they affect 100% of the people who bought them on console, but only a very small portion of the players who bought them on PC. This bug exists for several months without being fixed on either platform. It was reportedly fixed on PC roughly a week ago, but we still don't have the last few patches on console, so these paid tabs are *still* broken. I guarantee that if these paid tabs had the same bug on PC KB/M input mode, it would have been fixed in a week or less.

Another example of GGG's apparent disdain for console players is that we *almost never* get our own patch notes. Even when they actually fix a console-specific bug, it's usually not in the patch notes. We just get copy-paste of the PC patch notes, 99% of the time.

This is super frustrating, because it leaves some changes undocumented, and also makes it so that dedicated players have to go recheck the console specific issues every time there's a patch to see if it was fixed (spoiler, it usually isn't).

Just let people vent. At least until they actually fix some of what's broken.

Had a forum post the other day because a guy said he couldnt see poe on the store and I told him to take it as a blessing in disguise and that post got removed for being "needlessly negative" about a half hour or an hour after so at least we know and have proof that they can see our posts they just choose to actively ignore them. It's ridiculous at this point and nothing they do will justify the way they are currently treating the console player base... you can't excuse them for the holidays because as you stated we don't get any communication at all.

Sure this post will be removed just like the last but at least when it's removed we know someone is seeing the post and ignoring it as well.

In retrospect, I suppose QQPQ just saved me a bunch of typing. I intended to get to those points in part two (although I would have missed the patch notes one; I naively assume that if the patch notes don't have an explicit console-specific section, it is because there were none. I do not doubt you, but do you have any examples? I did miss the last league or two.). So, I suppose I will skip that and head to the end.

FFWD >>


That said, the player base needs a few significant things from GGG. The first is more transparency about bugs and issues. Whether that is in the form of a bug tracker (the Sims 4 has one that works) or just managing the bug report forums, combining duplicate reports, crosslinking shared issues, updating the bugs with where they are at in the process, and archiving fixed bugs with notes that they were patched (with a link to the specific patch). You can probably let Moderators do it (or the Help and Information forum personnel; they have the highest response rate out of any forum). In today's game landscape, there is no good reason for a live and constantly developing game not to have a public bug tracker.

The second thing needed is a commitment (with the follow-through) to get updates out to the console community at least as frequently as the PC community gets them. Yes, we know Sony and Microsoft each have patching processes that you must follow. If we knew the status of bugs and patches, we would know where it was in this process. We also know that having more patches means more chances for the console's disk layout to cause problems only solvable by a reinstall. However, I (at least) would prefer to have more patches and live with having to reinstall once or twice a league rather than continue dealing with broken gameplay that you have already fixed. While people in all corners of the forums say we feel like beta testers ( I have seen the same comments on the forums for multiple online games), I bet plenty of us (myself included) would be willing to beta test client-side or server-side patches and provide feedback if it would help streamline the process.

Those are just two things that, I think, would massively improve the happiness and contentment of the player base and would make it easier for the player base to do the two major things they probably should be doing (and probably would be doing if the changes were already in place).

With that, we move on to the players. First, before you start another new thread about the inexcusable and thoroughly exhausting loading screens, take a minute or five to search for the problem or complaint you have or the bug you are reporting. Let's not expect GGG to read through and respond to multiple threads on the same topic. If we can figure out how to play and min/max this amazingly complex, layered, and downright complicated game and its economy, we can figure out how to search the forums.

The second thing is to follow the bug reporting procedures in the pinned post in the bug report forum. I've done tech support; they ask these things for a reason, and most of what we give them is worse than useless. We need to do better (Myself included. I have made some threads in irritation. I intend to do better). However, I am not sure what good the MTR instructions, which seem Windows-specific, are doing for anyone, and I am surprised they do not have a full write-up like many software packages do on how to format a bug report. It is possible that we can't give GGG good bug reports because we don't know what information would actually be helpful to them.

In the end, while Console players may not be the second-class citizens we make ourselves out to be, we certainly are neglected step-children. The PC player base appears to feel neglected as well. I do not understand why GGG would want this status quo, nor why we allow them to continue making us feel this way.

I started this thread because there is so much useless noise on the console bug report forum (and I thought the numbers were interesting (even if they are so shallow as to be meaningless--I did say it was a slightly more than cursory look). If I am alone or way off base, I am sure my fellow players will gleefully let me know, but maybe I am not alone. I wanted to try to distill everything into some core issues and figure out what would need to change to make (frankly, at this point) the entire PoE community feel less like--well--exiles.

I apologize I dont know how to use these things. I play on the Xbox one s. An it's nearly unplayable. Ok it is unplayable. PoE is the only online game I'm having issues with. No offense GGG but poe has shitty graphics an runs shitty as hell. But I can play Warframe,GTA,red dead online.all with no issues. PoE tho is impossible to play.