Historically, subreddits were run by community volunteers because people were tired of being censored on official forums. Now subreddits are the official channel more often than not, and we're back to square one.

I think this really succinctly describes why reddit sucks now.

Some of us saw what was going to happen with D4. It was pretty obvious.

After DI, and D3, to expect D4 to launch in any decent state would have been naive at best.

I've said as much in the Diablo subreddit. D3 is now a good game, if it is what you are looking for. It's a fun romp, but... It isn't a truly heavy ARPG. If you want that POE is calling you.

Diablo 4 was great. I put probably 50+ hours into it and enjoyed it a lot.

I also completely ignored the opionion of whatever communities existed for it, because they ALWAYS complain and turn toxic, especially for Blizzard games. It’s inevitable and says very little about the actual game. Same thing happened with Overwatch 2 as well. It’s a great game yet somehow has only 10% positive reviews on Steam.

It is okay to like and enjoy a game that the majority of the playerbase does not, I've had similar experience in multiple games, mostly MMORPGs and ARPGs with expansions but that does not take away from the experience of other players.

It comes down to personal preference. If you find yourself liking a game/expansion when most of the playerbase does not, it is best to avoid online forums/subreddits where the game is put on full blast (sometimes unfairly) becuase people are extrememly emotional, when the best thing for the to do is to walk away and play games they enjoy, it is just a game the stakes couldn't be any lower.

50 hours is not the expectation from an ARPG mainline title. If their goal was to just push the story forward, fine. But that clearly isn’t what they were going for. From that perspective, it’s not great.

Overwatch got review bombed because they just remonetized overwatch 1 and did things they said they wouldn’t do. It’s actually a pretty good parallel to the unity story.

> It’s a great game yet somehow has only 10% positive reviews on Steam.

Or it's an objectively very bad game that you just happen to enjoy.

It has 79% on Metacritic, which is the closest thing we have to an objective review score.

You think critics are objective?

You think they want to pan the people handing them early review codes TOO hard given that it is how they make a living?

Often critics have little time to review a game, a few hours, etc... they have a ton of games to review, they'll use cheats in single player games, or play through on easy mode etc.

For a game like D4 that is played at the end game, and really the big problems will only show up later in the game... There's no way a review was going to be right.

Understanding what a critic can, and can not see is critical to understanding what they can tell us about a game. Personally, I give them some weight, but I've taken to waiting a bit and listening to people who love the genre speak about it.

When Raxx is panning D4... it's bad. Bad enough that 79 is a WAY overrate.

People expect 100's of hours of of Diablo games.

They are games we come back to again, and again, and again.

Last Epoch is really good too.

Strange, I heard from fans of 1&2 (and disliked 3) that Diablo 4 is excellent. How did you conclude that it is so bad and everyone who plays it is just a slave to blizzard?

I don’t think we can see the player numbers, but the number of people following D4 twitch streams has decreased by over 99% since launch. A lot of people played it - but almost everyone who played it has stopped playing it.

Personally I get it. I found D4 to be a fun, but bland and uninspired arpg. It has terrible class balance and skill balance. Despite a lot of promises, there’s almost no endgame to speak of. And there are basically no new ideas in D4 that weren’t already pioneered in D3 or path of exile. The art and music is beautiful, and the first few hours are definitely fun. But it’s not excellent by any means. It’s a bland, uninspired game lacking the depth, creativity and longevity that used to make blizzard games great.

Twitch numbers dropping off quickly after launch seems normal for any new game, as streamers will move on after having played through a game.

Depends how much you drop off, last time I looked D2 with PD2 had twice the audience of D3 and D4 which were around 680 views and D2R had 100 less ...

Discussions online have had this nature ever since they went mainstream I think. Especially Reddit I mean, some of those more popular subreddits are run mostly by kids is what I make out of it. Maybe not kids in terms of age but people who never grew up. Censorship seems to be the natural order of things in online communities where people don’t see or know each other, and when a lot of the context gets lost in the text only format. Here on HN too. Too many people with flagging abilities just flagging anything they disagree with, and good luck getting any mod’s attention after that. Unless you dance around the topic and never spell out certain types of takes, your posts will get fagged if the official narrative doesn’t match, and you will be accused of flaming.

Unfortunately people have convinced themselves that some opinions -those they disagree with- are dangerous for others to read. From cancelling your preorder for a game after a beta to “let’s think twice about pharmaceutical companies’ motives”, there will be someone who thinks your motives are unclean, you’re an agitator, or full on evil, and therefor deserve to be silenced.

> Unfortunately people have convinced themselves that some opinions -those they disagree with- are dangerous for others to read.

Or more likely than seeing them as "dangerous" they recognize that if you allow opinions to be expressed, others may gain a new perspective by reading it or even adopt that opinion themselves.

Or in the case of HN, certain topics of conversation are censored or discouraged because they tend to lead to boring/repetitive/annoying/aggressive comment threads.

Censorship is necessary for a civil forum. If you don't censor, you get 8chan, a place full of nothing but vileness. All the shitty people congregate there because no one will censor them or ban them, and all the decent people leave.

Of course, we usually call this "moderation" instead of "censorship", but it's mostly the same, except it isn't done by a government.

So the quality of any forum just comes down to the quality of the moderation. Good moderators keep out the off-topic crap and general nastiness, shitty moderators ban people for saying they don't like the company's new game.

One man's nastiness is another's joke, or opinion. What people don't understand is that if you are ok with the idea of a so called "moderation" that's more on the limiting side, some other group of moderators will come later and apply he same rules but from the different side, and your sides ideas won't see the light of day. It's a very simple concept that people have forgotten why freedom of expression is the first amendment. The problem imo is that it doesn't translate well to online communities that are open to anyone. I'm sure people have thought about this endlessly before, but I don't know if there's any progress.

Online communities are communities like any other: they're a product of the people in them, and the people that control them. You may find some are more to your liking than others. There's no perfect way of doing moderation. If you don't like any kind of moderation at all, you're free to hang out on 8chan with the neo-Nazis.