I felt the need to write an open letter to the Reddit PoE community because of some of the replies I've seen around here recently. It seems there's a troubling lack of respect in many comments to each other and particularly to the devs which have enough upvotes as to sadden me. I am generally a lurker and definitely not a GGG fanboy, but I do consider myself a member of this community and nothing has soured me about this game more than the players. Negative in-game experiences with players aside; I wanted simply to address those of us that use this subreddit.

I've consistently found myself in disagreement with many of the changes and choices that GGG has made in the development of the game. I've lost many friends to things like running out of maps (open beta) or having their favorite build(s) nerfed into a shadow of itself and I feel that discouragement as acutely as anyone. I tend to be on the pessimistic side of the fence when I see something new or controversial as well, but even then, you can usually understand the rationale behind these changes because of the transparency of GGG.

Our community is shown a tremendous amount of respect by the developers (Chris in particular) who always take the time out of their days or even devote time to us in order to give us a peek behind the curtain, explain things, spoil secrets (in a good way) and always in a courteous manner.

But we're all human and a little respect goes a long way

Does anyone believe they love PoE more than its devs, or that they're entitled to call it their baby? From my point of view, the developers have treated not only us, but their game with deference.

I can complain with the best of them. I've upvoted more complaint threads than I care to say and most of my posts here are to give my two cents on something that I'd like to see changed/fixed. But no matter our level of frustration, GGG and the devs that post here deserve our respect. I know the "few bad apples" is nothing new, but when rude or disrespectful replies start floating up toward the top of the list, it becomes an "all of us" issue.

I don't want to see them commenting here less and less because it's discouraging for them to do so.

What am I trying to accomplish and what does it mean to you? I'm simply of the hope that we can all raise the level of discourse and respect in here. When I scroll through a post with 200 replies and see Chris replying to a dozen different people about myriad topics, I can only think that they've earned that at the very least.

To GGG: Only experiencing the Beta vicariously and seeing the doomsday Act 4 threads here around release I'd like to say that this release surpassed my expectations. Pre-harvest act 4 was a breath of fresh air content-wise. The gem vendors and questing zone rearrangement has helped make the game very fluid. Even some changes that I didn't agree with like Arctic Armour, I've been able to utilize them in my recent playing. Balance aside, I enjoy the current feel of the game.

They've put in the effort to make the game great. Let's put in the effort to make our community great too.