Bex's Four-Year Community Manager Anniversary

Path of Exile has the best community manager in the world!
Gratz Bex!

Very cool! Congrats, Bex! And thanks for all the hard work!

Congrats!!!!!

That is great achievement

CONGRATS
That is great achievement.

Thanks for helping to create an awesome game! :)

Conga Rats!

Grats Bex, keep up the good memes!

Gratz

Now why the hate for the Toucans of the world :(?

@OP On the note of community feedback:

I initially played PoE back when it first came out and got bored after completing the main story.

I have recently returned and am very pleasantly surprised about how far the game has come.

The game is overall a great net positive definite recommend to anyone on my contacts, however, I do have some minor criticisms to share.

-RMT
Real Money Trading and botting causes huge inflation issues which is especially important in league play as the economy is finite.

I know you have made efforts to crack down on this, but as an avid gamer and streamer I find that the RMT in PoE is still drastically more out of control than in most other contemporary games. Exceptions exist, PoE is not the worst, but at best you'd get a C letter grade on this. Cracking down more would very much benefit the community overall.

-Microtransaction pricing
Microtransactions are too expensive to buy as impulse purchases, and cosmetic items are primarily, for gamers, impulse purchases. This means someone would really only get a set of cosmetics if they really want to support the company. I would suggest adding more cosmetics at a faster rate and a lower price point as this would make them more accessible to the average player. All in all I think you'll find you would more than make up in volume what you lose in price point. As of now a cosmetic set runs about $45 USD, and that's frankly, too much money for the value unless you factor in simply wanting to support the developers. Having more cosmetics would add more diversity and customization options that are easier to access.

-Lack of female cosmetics
Additionally I find the lack of feminine cosmetics disturbing. Even when playing as a female character, when using skins they simply show a brawny dude rather than a female form. It's frankly annoying if you prefer ascendancies that are only available from female model characters.

-Lack of technical optimization
Regular DC, hang time, lag, infinite load screens are a bit too common to get a total pass for being a free to play game. Good will only goes so far for being FTP, the play experience is key, and these things interfere with the overall play experience and are a bit too common regardless of PC specs and connection speeds. I have a beast of a PC and laptop and maximum connection speed as a streamer and none of that prevents these issues from being "fairly common", I expect at least once a day I will experience one of these issues.

-End game grind
During leagues end game grind can hit a wall for most players that aren't career PoE players. I would suggest looking at the reward structures and RMT for leagues separate from standard to ensure players aren't requires to play 18 hours a day to be able to achieve content goals like defeating uber elder in the span of a league. When they are faced with options like a huge grind wall or paying for RMT, it makes RMT all the worse as it is an easily attractive option when achieving goals seems (though it isn't) otherwise impossible. That said a lot of this would be impacted by cracking down on RMT harder.

Alternately, currency dumping and other issues with trade might be solved with something reasonable like a 2 trades per day per character level limit. This would make people think more crucially about their trades and also limit how much individual players can control a market and artificially inflate or deflate certain aspects of the economy. It could still be circumvented with alt accounts but that would require additional investment into play time and also pose minor inconveniences when switching accounts, meaning players still have functionally infinite trades per day, but it's simply inconvenient to trade at a level that destroys certain aspects of the economy.

-Help tip about build forums and official wiki.
After completing act 5 it would make sense to inform new players of these resources as part of the tutorial. This allows the player to do some prelim research before investing too much in one character where they dig themselves a hole that is very difficult to get out of in the span of a league.

That said, those are all minor sticking points in an otherwise great game.

A special shout to the endgame designers as this is the first time in recent history I've seen games as a service to endgame properly with scaling difficulty/rewards (ie delve/maps). Typically this is a huge problem with games as a service and it's nice to see someone doing it well.

That's my two cents, please pass it on where relevant :)

Congrats Bex