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I'm sure Paizo is fine - and the game will be fine.
Fingers crossed! :)
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I don't remember the original wording for Arcwn Cascade and now I do just to see if this is right, the only thing I want is a Meld into Eidolon Class Archetype for Summonert that allows them to cast magic still while being their Eidolon...But that is just me.
My biggest hope is they actually nerf Rogue from critical succeeding all 3 saves starting level 17 and they hold onto their promise for Kineticist .
I probably shouldn't open this can of worms but you keep mentioning this kineticist errata. What errata are you expecting? As far as I know, there isn't really anything that needs errata
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I probably shouldn't open this can of worms but you keep mentioning this kineticist errata. What errata are you expecting? As far as I know, there isn't really anything that needs errataI don't remember the original wording for Arcwn Cascade and now I do just to see if this is right, the only thing I want is a Meld into Eidolon Class Archetype for Summonert that allows them to cast magic still while being their Eidolon...But that is just me.
My biggest hope is they actually nerf Rogue from critical succeeding all 3 saves starting level 17 and they hold onto their promise for Kineticist .
I think it's about how Kineticist interacts, or doesn't, with Mythic rules.
Many mythic abilities reference class DC, the Kineticist works fine with those.
The “spend point for mythic proficiency on a strike or spell” abilities largely seem like traps given the limited points available and all the “don’t die/lose” abilities you can use them on instead. It’s not like a crit kinetic blast or crit fail impulse or two is going to quickly end many important fights.
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To be devils advocate for a moment, I still have very serious misgivings when we are dealing with a system that uses errata, and went through a remaster, yet has failed to address core issues that people pointed out at launch.
To explain a bit, by chance, the dying rules "change" went viral enough to actually "force" official mention and errata. Yet there are other things that right now, do not work as written.
For weakness & resistance to function as they are run by Foundry (and most tables), at best, there are a few sentences/instructions missing.
It is not possible to use the written rules to construct the behavior most play with.
Only because I actively searched for an explanation, I found a word of dev post in the forums describing the intended outcome/behavior. Even then, posters very clearly showed that those rules did not output that behavior. Each "broken RaW" like that is a priority 1 bug for patching. The online portion of the player base only runs those rules "correctly" like that because there was a tiny pseudo-official acknowledgement and correction. Devs should never feel pressured to show up in public threads to explain that (some) staff internally tell AP writers to literally double the book's prescribed gold value reward table, because the official one (which is all that player GM have to homebrew their own campaigns!) is far too low. The official table should be changed, and any dev employee aware of the needed change should be empowered to raise that problem internally and make the change happen.
And that specific rule, along with others, never stopped being a priority fix. But the bugs have never have been officially acknowledged, let alone patched. In software, you may genuinely leave a big chunk of work half finished to start work on a priority 1. There is just no way to perform errata, and to justify leaving those errors as the official last word.
It's 2024, no player (GMs included) cares about book publishing as an excuse to not have a hotlist of "future errata" / never republished book errors that is publicly facing and Paizo-official. Given how easy it is to slap a "living document" on their existing website, it's essentially a form of corporate insanity to fail to have that small of a token redress.
When players trust the rules in Foundry more than the books, that should be a dagger in Paizo's heart that they are in a present state of failure, below minimum par.
The only explanation is that this missing document is presently nonexistent in order to "save face." (which is why when their face is compromised by viral bugs, they get patched)
We have to go to the layer beneath the errors if we want things to improve. It is the act of admitting these imperfections exist that is the real issue at play.
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My biggest worry is not the bugs, but this "Mask up, always" behavior Paizo seems to have.
Afaik, they never say things like "Yes, you found a real bug, it's supposed to work like this instead. (We have now added that to the future errata page on our website)" The best you can hope for is that said error is indirectly acknowledged by implication if it's lucky enough to get changed via errata.
There are still people arguing about bomb splash rules because the PC1 flat out contradicts the GMC & PC2 books.
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Negative feedback is a requirement for institutions to maintain health and survive in the long run. The complete "pants-s+&!ting terror" that many American workers feel at the thought of giving their boss bad news is a growing and already severe societal issue, to the point that beloved country boy science youtubers have to be the one to, and this is not an exaggeration, go to give lectures to NASA to "let them down gently" ; to break the news that their current mission is complete nonviable s*@! show and that the core problem of how that could happen is so obvious, he explains to their face that the whole operational structure has been compromised specifically by the inability to give/receive negative feedback. (thankfully that lecture made big waves and was (seemingly) not in vain)
To be clear, while excuses don't fix bugs, I want to make sure that everyone understands that the core issue is not exclusive to Paizo, while shouting that you can give/take negative feedback with 0 hard feelings attached.
This specific culture issue seems to be strangling Paizo rather seriously at present, but it is one that can be overcome.
I think it's about how Kineticist interacts, or doesn't, with Mythic rules.I probably shouldn't open this can of worms but you keep mentioning this kineticist errata. What errata are you expecting? As far as I know, there isn't really anything that needs errataI don't remember the original wording for Arcwn Cascade and now I do just to see if this is right, the only thing I want is a Meld into Eidolon Class Archetype for Summonert that allows them to cast magic still while being their Eidolon...But that is just me.
My biggest hope is they actually nerf Rogue from critical succeeding all 3 saves starting level 17 and they hold onto their promise for Kineticist .
Ah so not errata for kineticist but errata for mythic rules. Yeah that would be nice. I didn't see that promised anywhere, I'm glad they're looking into it
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I very much doubt they are looking into it. I would give good odds nothing is errata'd from War of Immortal or Divine Mysteries. The only bit that gives me pause is the exemplar MC dedication. It's so egregiously bad and hated that they may feel compelled to address it salvage their reputation, but it's so egregiously bad that they may feel they haven't had enough time to figure out how to fix it.
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Personally I hope not, I might be in the vocal minority (that's not a thing) but I like kineticist the way it is. Changing kinetic blasts to act as strikes or other impulses to act as spells would be messy in the way it interacts with other feats. I'm glad we haven't gotten any promises to that effect, sounds like just wishful thinking from people as of now.
Even if Mythic gets errata for its (non) interaction with Kineticist, this will not future-proof later designs that similarly only impact Strikes and spells.
Putting an errata on Kineticist would be much simpler IMO.
Yeah, Errata for RoE (and maybe SoM) is on the table, so adding a line to the rule for impulses or spellstrikes is probably the most efficient way to do this, then future classes can be written with mythic stuff in mind.
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My biggest worry is not the bugs, but this "Mask up, always" behavior Paizo seems to have.
To be fair, I've seen this attitude in ALL of the TTRPG companies I've seen. It's not unique to Paizo.
The developers of Star Wars Saga publically threatened to shoot me "with tranquilizer darts over the internet, if they could," because of how often I pointed out these kinds of mistakes to them.
WotC was even worse. They simply closed down their official forums to shut us up.
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I don't remember the original wording for Arcwn Cascade and now I do just to see if this is right, the only thing I want is a Meld into Eidolon Class Archetype for Summonert that allows them to cast magic still while being their Eidolon...But that is just me.
A meld into eidolon class archetype will be cool, but that would be new content rather than errata.
Arcane Cascade's original version was a Stance with the requirement "You used your most recent action this turn to Cast a Spell or make a Spellstrike."
The problem there is that the Stance trait says a stance ends as soon as you no longer meet the requirement... which since when you put up Arcane Cascade, the last action you did was not a spell/sepllstrike, it ends instantly.
It was obviously an oversight and obvious how it was intended to work. But since SoM never got errata, it stayed that way for 2 years. The Remaster updates finally fixed it by adding this to the Requirements: "You need to meet this requirement only to enter the stance, not to remain in it."
For weakness & resistance to function as they are run by Foundry (and most tables), at best, there are a few sentences/instructions missing.
"Instances of damage" and weakness/resistance is something that would benefit tremendously from a PF1 style FAQ entry to take a couple of the more complex scenarios and show what outcome the developers expect. Since a FAQ isn't constrained by page space the way errata is, it would allow for the kind of explanation this needs. Errata could follow if what they expect to have happen simply can't happen within the rules, but I'd do the FAQ first and then see if errata is necessary.
I suspect that "whatever Foundry does" became the most commonly used standard simply because a lot of us use Foundry and it's easy to go along with what it does (vs doing something else, which is significantly more work).
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Thanks for the kind words Trip H. I and others have been decrying the strange process of just bulldozing on through with shiny new instead of fixing the glaring errors for…years at this stage. And the usual folks keep justifying it for Paizo that “new content is necessary to pay the bills”. But where is such obvious abrogation of essential quality control “necessary”?
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Several broken promises? I know about the scuffle over oracles and PFS, what are the others?A year ago I warned of dark times ahead. I suspect this is just the beginning of the decline.I really don't think that's a fair response to someone leaving for unknown reasons. Micheal obviously did great work but to suggest everything is going to decline because he left just seems disrespectful.Not by itself it's not.
But it's not just Sayre is it? It's Seifter and others as well. When your most talented people are jumping ship (or being thrown off) then that's a real bad sign that something in the company isn't right.
Tack on some of the poor policy decisions in the last couple years along with several broken promises to the consumers and all of the hurdles imposed by the OGL legal war with Hasbro and you have more than enough signs to warrant such a doom and gloom outlook.
OOOOOH. I forgot about the post-exemplar playtest claim that while exemplar was losing its ability to pick domain spells via a 1st or 2nd level feat, there was going to be an archetype to let anyone do that! People feverishly speculated about this alternative to cleric and champion as a way to get domain spell access at 2nd or at least 4th level.
And in the fullness of time we got two archetypes that can grant domains! They're both rare and you enter at 12th level - Godling mythic path and Mortal Herald can-be-mythic archetype. Great job, guys, no loss to anyone's playtest exemplar builds.
I think there was some other contemporaneous "Paizo's marketing was blatantly wrong and this thing just didn't show up or work the way the guy in the stream had promised" in the last few months, but the domain archetype thing kind of drove it from people's minds.
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TBH at this point I think the errata is going to be a disaster. So many people have pinned their own personal issues with the system on being fixed by the great fall errata, even for things that aren't really problems or necessarily within the scope of errata, that I feel like it's going to be impossible for whatever we get to be satisfying.
The vast majority of the errata we get is correction of significant textual errors, more fundamental changes are somewhat uncommon. More common in recent PF2 errata, but still not a consistent or normal thing.
Paizo is probably not going to rework your favorite class or least favorite system mechanic to line up with your homebrew. There's a decent chance they aren't even going to fix that one mechanic that you think is super broken and unintelligible RAW even though somehow almost everyone else manages to run it correctly without any trouble.
You should probably go into it expecting typo corrections, adjusted page references, and a few fixes to feats or features that reference things that aren't in the game (like spells that don't exist).
Then you can be pleasantly surprised if there's anything more substantial than that.
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My biggest worry is not the bugs, but this "Mask up, always" behavior Paizo seems to have.To be fair, I've seen this attitude in ALL of the TTRPG companies I've seen. It's not unique to Paizo.
The developers of Star Wars Saga publically threatened to shoot me "with tranquilizer darts over the internet, if they could," because of how often I pointed out these kinds of mistakes to them.
WotC was even worse. They simply closed down their official forums to shut us up.
I highly recommend everyone watch that linked to-NASA lecture, because it is a super dense breakdown of that specific rot that once you learn of, you will see it everywhere in modern society.
People are scared to stick their neck out for anything, even good bosses struggle to get their employees to raise easily-fixable issues. "Work life" has just become so impossibly fragile and hostile, it's saturated everyone with a specific type of fear.
(and unfortunately, this can be worse inside passion industries like this one. What kind of person would endanger their "dream job" of paid ttrpg writing by "complaining" up the chain about "5 yr old bugs that no one cares about"?)
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If developers learnt something with One D&D is that you can promote a product as "a revision that fully updates everything to the new standard" that people is going to believe it even if you go and release the same system with, like, 4 or 5 minor changes and 2 or 3 changes that actually matter.
What I'm trying to say is that, if Paizo really wanted, they could take a more slow year (which would kind of make sense after a year that was all about the Remaster) that they would release a little less content than normal but promise more frequent erratas (like they already did in the past, but actually happening this time around) that regardless of if the content is of quality or not people are going to be okay with it. Not like I think Paizo releases bad content, they have their few mistakes here and there, but if this scenario were to happen I'm sure Paizo is likely going to deliver in a positive way, or at least not in a "so horrible I hate this" like WoTC.
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Wow, this has turned into a complete doomer thread. Would be really nice if people would refrain from making incendiary statements like "pushing out more garbage".
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What I'm trying to say is that, if Paizo really wanted, they could take a more slow year (which would kind of make sense after a year that was all about the Remaster) that they would release a little less content than normal but promise more frequent erratas (like they already did in the past, but actually happening this time around) that regardless of if the content is of quality or not people are going to be okay with it.
Do you think Paizo's desired metrics are "people [being] ok with it" or "sales minus expenses"?
2024 was a very little indeed Starfinder revenue year, offset by the one time bump in PF2 remaster sales to the extent they didn't just cannibalize or pull forward their originally planned release revenue. They've raised prices, they've got a union agreement presumably constraining their labor use practices, and they're not going to want to cut headcount as part of a deliberate "publish slower to make randos on the internet potentially happier" strategy. The content isn't slowing down.
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The NASA video Trip linked was pretty interesting, but I think there are fundamental differences between Paizo and NASA.
Such as in the stakes of the missions and the resources available. If Paizo prints a few mistakes people will be unhappy with a book - but pilots won't die on prime time television. Likewise, they don't get the kind of resources allocated to print a book that you'd use to race the USSR to the moon.
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My own favorite analogy for RPGs is programming. I think RPG rulesystems are like programming languages meant to run on human brains.
A lot of the big classic programming languages were first designed, using formal grammars to specify them. And when you're just specifying a language on paper, it's possible to forget something, or leave something unclear. And you can still print your specification, because paper doesn't care if what you're writing is correct or complete.
But then someone goes and tries to actually implement your language. Make a compiler for it that takes code written in your language, compiles it to machine code, and run it. And they then have to make up their mind on what to do with oversights or ambiguities. They have to do something with it.
Sometimes there's multiple implementations for a programming language, but one of them becomes considered the "reference" implementation. Others might have technically executed the implementation in a different way, but aim to produce the same behavior in the ambiguous cases.
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I think that's a good way to look at the Paizo/Foundry situation. At some point Foundry has to pick an interpretation of for example how to apply resistances to attacks that deal a smorgasboard of damage types against an enemy with multiple resistances. Paizo's not managed to give a definite answer to that in five years, so by now people are saying "well, Foundry does it like this..."
Tabletop play is more permissive. Humans are much more flexible at running not-so-strict code than computers are. Just because Paizo's left some questions unsolved doesn't mean we cannot play in that corner of the rules at all. We manage it all the time, the game is not so flawed to be unplayable.
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That doesn't mean I don't want some errata for this and that, but I do think it's useful to maintain a sense of perspective on how problematic the problems really are. As well as a sense of realism - Paizo wants to put a big book on the table every GenCon. Quite a few of us are also looking forward to that book. But the book requires a production timeline, and if Paizo has to choose between that timeline and noncritical errata, they're gonna choose the timeline.
Noncritical errata? I mean, really, most errata is noncritical. I think the Dying rules are one of the rare exceptions. Something has to make the game abruptly and deeply unplayable to be critical. As much as I'm irritated that the rules for getting stunned during your own turn are so bad, I can't say it's making the whole game unplayable for me.
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Hey, can we stop assuming what Paizo is doing, has done, or has 'lost', or whatever? It's all mostly speculation, anyway.
It's unproductive, and its stuff like this that makes ANY dev not want to engage with the community.
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Hey, can we stop assuming what Paizo is doing, has done, or has 'lost', or whatever? It's all mostly speculation, anyway.
It's unproductive, and its stuff like this that makes ANY dev not want to engage with the community.
The whole damn point is that it IS productive to discuss negative feedback. And it is necessary to confront and deal with negative things instead of pretending they don't exist. Because eventually, pretending becomes impossible, and you get situations like "where did this dev go?" where a potential PR disaster is averted only because of the fast reflexes of some employee making a snap decision to stop the buildup of rumor milling right when the post starts going viral.
Again, even NASA struggles against this "no-negativity" mask issue. But ignoring the problems, pressuring people to self-censor against negative feedback, only makes things worse because real problems do not fix themselves.
The reason why negative feedback seems to clog up the forums is because it IS clogging up the forums. Clog, as in a backlog of untreated and unfixed problems that Paizo knows about, but refuses to so much as *admit* they know about them, let alone do something to help lessen them.
Every time a new player "discovers" a known bug, there's a chance they'll post it again without looking hard enough to see if it's one of many known and ignored problems. If they knew the devs were aware, that would reduce the chance of posting dramatically.
If you don't want the forums to be full of negativity, then you should be in favor of an official bug redress / future errata page, as that would genuinely reduce the negativity you are exposed to and ever-so-slightly harmed by (because while minor each occurrence, it is genuinely corrosive)
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Hey, can we stop assuming what Paizo is doing, has done, or has 'lost', or whatever? It's all mostly speculation, anyway.
It's unproductive, and its stuff like this that makes ANY dev not want to engage with the community.
The whole damn point is that it IS productive to discuss negative feedback. And it is necessary to confront and deal with negative things instead of pretending they don't exist. Because eventually, pretending becomes impossible, and you get situations like "where did this dev go?" where a potential PR disaster is averted only because of the fast reflexes of some employee making a snap decision to stop the buildup of rumor milling right when the post starts going viral.
Again, even NASA struggles against this "no-negativity" mask issue. But ignoring the problems, pressuring people to self-censor against negative feedback, only makes things worse because real problems do not fix themselves.
The reason why negative feedback seems to clog up the forums is because it IS clogging up the forums. Clog, as in a backlog of untreated and unfixed problems that Paizo knows about, but refuses to so much as *admit* they know about them, let alone do something to help lessen them.
Yep, the “no-negativity” is so prevalent as to be stifling. It really feels like more open engagement would at least clear the air. Many times. Instead of endlessly blaming the community, the people who post here in the hopes of better dialogue, as being toxic and speculative.
I can be terse and dismissive at times, but I truly wish for Pathfinder 2R to be the best it can be. And it seems that often Paizo doesn’t care enough about that and would rather it be “mostly functional” except where a) we know there’s an error and b) we’ve published more content that accumulates the known error of a). And that seems…like malfeasance. I’m not sure how else to put it, and I’m not being toxic, or attempting to be.
Fix the known errors. Don’t exacerbate them. To me that seems like a baseline, not an especial bonus.
Paizo, aside from scheduled announcements at conventions, already doesn't interact with the community anyway so it's not like we're losing anything here.Hey, can we stop assuming what Paizo is doing, has done, or has 'lost', or whatever? It's all mostly speculation, anyway.
It's unproductive, and its stuff like this that makes ANY dev not want to engage with the community.
At least not on this site. They do seem to go on streams and other sites but avoid here like the plague. James Jacobs is about the only one I can remember posting anything here in quite a long time but every once in a while someone will post a link to someplace where they engage with another community and answer questions.
Roiling Mudslide doesn't have a range? Single feat of element of single class affected: Lower priority: I'll fix that after we have real weakness/resistance rules, etc.
On the other hand, we had no real clue what Roiling Mudslide's range should be, while most people are able to run damage correctly. So while one impacts a bigger slice of the game, the other is a more significant error in terms of how it impacts playability and consistency. It's also probably easier to quickly add a range entry to that ability than it is to figure out the best way to completely reword another rules section. So I don't think it's really that clear cut.
Roiling Mudslide was given an area of effect in the last errata. Before that, you could just rely on "GM makes a ruling" and be fine.
At least not on this site. They do seem to go on streams and other sites but avoid here like the plague. James Jacobs is about the only one I can remember posting anything here in quite a long time but every once in a while someone will post a link to someplace where they engage with another community and answer questions.Paizo, aside from scheduled announcements at conventions, already doesn't interact with the community anyway so it's not like we're losing anything here.Hey, can we stop assuming what Paizo is doing, has done, or has 'lost', or whatever? It's all mostly speculation, anyway.
It's unproductive, and its stuff like this that makes ANY dev not want to engage with the community.
This site should be the primary hub for them to engage with the community. It would drive traffic to their forum/website while putting all communication in one easy-to-find place.
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Paizo developers are still people, not the company they work for. Be as negative as you want, but perhaps some slightest awareness of tone might help criticism be heard as something other than an personal attack. The developers necessarily have a thick skin, but nobody does their best work under an acrimonious watch. It should seem no surprise that so many companies have cut off communication in such a climate.
Paizo developers are still people, not the company they work for. Be as negative as you want, but perhaps some slightest awareness of tone might help criticism be heard as something other than an personal attack. The developers necessarily have a thick skin, but nobody does their best work under an acrimonious watch. It should seem no surprise that so many companies have cut off communication in such a climate.
We're not exactly pointing to any given dev and saying, "Yeah, you're the one who's causing these issues. You're bad and should feel bad." We're pointing out systemic issues like lack of communication, the lesser quality of work since the remaster, the loss of big-name team members, and a less-than-desirable errata schedule.
Much of this could be solved with communication because people tend to be more forgiving when you're willing to step up and explain why certain things aren't happening. Then we'd be less negative and more supportive because we'd have a more humanized team to empathize with. A lot of this negativity is self-inflicted.
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The bugs that get me the most are those that are not only left unfixed, but that also continue to get propagated into new content.
Take the nonfunctional glide abilities for example: Glider Form, Grippli Glide, Iruxi Glide, Leahy Glide, and Tripkee Glide, and more). They keep repeating the same problematic wording.
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Roiling Mudslide was given an area of effect in the last errata. Before that, you could just rely on "GM makes a ruling" and be fine.Is that the standard we're holding Paizo to these days? Just, "Eh, we can fix it ourselves so we should give them a pass for writing bad rules and being slow to fix them."
"Rules issues you can easily fix at the table" have been a thing I've been fine with for like 30 years. They are in no sense "new" or "unprecedented" or even "uncommon" in this industry.
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Wow, this has turned into a complete doomer thread. Would be really nice if people would refrain from making incendiary statements like "pushing out more garbage".If that is their honest opinion why should it be censored? Paizo isn't our friend, it's a business that we should hold to the highest possible standards.
Because it's a highly insulting statement. And while Paizo isn't our "friend", they are also not our enemy and are also a company which treats well with customers and keeps our hobby alive. I find those super antagonistic statements out of nowhere to be bad form. Constructive criticism can be well measured, telling someone that they are "pushing out garbage" is certainly not.
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If Paizo went under tomorrow our hobby would still exist and thrive. Unless your only interaction with the hobby is via Paizo's IP, in which case, I suggest you at least try other systems.Because it's a highly insulting statement. And while Paizo isn't our "friend", they are also not our enemy and are also a company which treats well with customers and keeps our hobby alive. I find those super antagonistic statements out of nowhere to be bad form. Constructive criticism can be well measured, telling someone that they are "pushing out garbage" is certainly not.Wow, this has turned into a complete doomer thread. Would be really nice if people would refrain from making incendiary statements like "pushing out more garbage".If that is their honest opinion why should it be censored? Paizo isn't our friend, it's a business that we should hold to the highest possible standards.
You are just a gem of social interaction, aren't you? They keep my hobby of playing Pathfinder alive, which is a system I love and have been playing now for close to 15 years. I will not be going to any other system, because I like this one best, first in it's 1E form and now in the 2E version. Most other systems I've played in the past (Werewolf: The Apocalypse, AD&D 2nd Ed, D&D 3.0 / 3.5, Shadowrun) are either functionally dead or (for me) worse than Pathfinder in their setting and rule implementation, anyway.
So while I of course have my own criticisms (why is in 2E mere jumping an impossibility by the rules when you get a free stride where you are allowed by the rule text to fly or swim or climb? That makes zero sense), I think presenting that in a constructive manner is a much more likely proposition to be heard somewhere than making insulting statements.
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I agree that calling the hard work of others garbage is not really productive or helpful as far as criticisms go.
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Paizo, aside from scheduled announcements at conventions, already doesn't interact with the community anyway so it's not like we're losing anything here.Hey, can we stop assuming what Paizo is doing, has done, or has 'lost', or whatever? It's all mostly speculation, anyway.
It's unproductive, and its stuff like this that makes ANY dev not want to engage with the community.
They literally posted in this thread.
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My biggest worry is not the bugs, but this "Mask up, always" behavior Paizo seems to have.To be fair, I've seen this attitude in ALL of the TTRPG companies I've seen. It's not unique to Paizo.
The developers of Star Wars Saga publically threatened to shoot me "with tranquilizer darts over the internet, if they could," because of how often I pointed out these kinds of mistakes to them.
WotC was even worse. They simply closed down their official forums to shut us up.
This certainly is the standard for sure (minus the joke/threat I think). FFG even had obscure dev quotes clarifying interactions for their Star Wars system & ultimately deleted their forums too. So it's sorta funny how similar the playbook for this stuff is (I pray Paizo never gets rid of the forums). Though as an aside, wasn't WotC also the developer of Star Wars Saga Edition or am I just wrong?
But back on point though, is Paizo perfect? Certainly no. But at least generally I feel like they're trying to do better which is more that I can say for most TTRPG devs. Like obviously a different system, but as someone who remembers the flaming around whether 1e Monks should be good in combat (AoMF costs, Dr vs enhancement, whether unarmed attacks were "weapons", and a bunch of other stuff that basically was emergent from 1e being based on 3.5) it was super cool to see Monk's being objectively good martials in 2e. It does give the sense that they're listening to feedback, even if they are ultimately slow to act on it. That might be a low bar, but it is still better than their competition it seems.
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The PoV I have is that the "no negativity" mask is a plug in the pipes. While the "negativity flow" of pf2 is genuinely very low compared to other forums I've been on, it doesn't matter when there is no outlet, no release valve.
So long as the pipe is blocked, posters don't think their words are doing anything, then the toxicity and hostility will build and build.
Paizo looks to be in "urgency/emergency only" interaction mode; when some poster guesses that bullseye problem, someone inside Paizo worries a pipe could burst, so a dev posts to crack open the line and, yeah, that high pressure means that everyone's going to get sprayed by some repressed nastiness as the toxic pressure drops. It's not fun to make a dev post in that context. But some people's job is to be a janitor.
The proper response to this unhealthy status quo is not closing the pipe to build more pressure again, it's to build a backsplash to catch as much filth as you can, then open up the pipe just a little at a time to drain that muck.
Things like a specific bug report forum are great tools for this, but when the players recognize that said forums don't work, they don't stop posting, they instead move their posts into other forums for public view. In other words: If they don't think a dev is seeing it, they'll post somewhere they think it might be heard/felt by those inside Paizo.
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I'm not a no-negativity person. I just don't particular think any of this is all that serious. There's no moral issue here from the consumer perspective. The game plays just fine at my tables.
So. Eh.
Community & Social Media Specialist
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Wanted to make a little statement here! I'm Maya, the new Community Specialist here at Paizo. It's really great to meet you! All of you. Even the angry ones. You're all apart of our community, and I'm happy you're all here. We as a company and a community can't grow if we only listen to the positive comments and members of our community. You're all important to helping us make good content, the content we're passionate about, and the content you want. I'm hoping that by joining the company and jumping right into the forums in my second week here, I'll show you through my actions (and my words) that we're working hard to make sure all your voices are heard by interacting directly with the community here at Paizo.
Secondly, I think we can all agree some comments in this thread have turned pretty nasty. The reason I say that is NOT because of the differing opinions being shared, which is why I am not closing the thread but rather just moderating the comments that had direct insults to other users in space. I say that simply because of the insults being tossed around here. This is not something we condone. It's entirely against what we stand for. People can be different, of course. Every member of our community is different, and has a right to their opinion, but no one should be simply hurling insults at each other.
Thirdly, I'd like to answer some questions I saw getting asked in this thread.
- Yes, we are currently working on updating our website! It is a very slow and difficult thing to do, but it is absolutely, 100%, underway.
- The fall errata will be released in three days, on 12/16!
- We will not be closing down forums, but we will be taking breaches to our Code of Conduct very seriously.
- I am here to be directly involved with the community, and it is my genuine goal to change the sentiment that your opinions are falling on deaf ears.
All of that being said, I still want to say thank you. Thank you to everyone who expressed and will continue to express their opinions here about the errata and the space. It takes a lot of courage and vulnerability to be honest about your feelings, and that should be and is being appreciated. However, please remember to refrain from insulting each other when stating your differing opinions. If you see something and find yourself unable to state your differences without lashing out, do what I do. Grab a cup of tea and vigorously crochet. Put that energy into something productive and positive, which insulting each other is not.
Thank you again for expressing your opinions here, but, to keep it short (after this very, very long comment), spiraling into rudeness is just not how we roll.